As the creator of Nintendo titans like The Legend of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto's influence can be felt across the entire gaming sphere. It's no surprise that modern platformers still bear commonalities with Super Mario Bros., for example, and even more offbeat Miyamoto creations like Pikmin have inspired their share of games. Some places where Miyamoto's influence crops up can still be unexpected, however, and one of the oddest and most infamous games to ever cite his legacy is Daikatana.
When it was announced in 1997, Daikatana seemed like a surefire candidate for success. As a new FPS from John Romero, the lead designer of DOOM and Quake, it was a promising flagship for his newly formed studio, Ion Storm. By the time the game limped onto store shelves on May 23, 2000, however, it was clear that Daikatana wasn't everything fans had hoped for. It's far from the worst game of all time, but the circumstances surrounding its release did it no favors, making its homage to Miyamoto less of an honor than it might have been.
Daikatana's Protagonist Is Named After Miyamoto
A Swordsman Of A Surprising Lineage
Daikatana hops across settings and ideas, but as its name indicates, it focuses on a Japanese element that wasn't present in Romero's previous hits. In the future, "Renaissance man" Hiro Miyamoto is pulled into a quest to recover the legendary daikatana sword and rescue its intended wielder. The name Miyamoto seems like an obvious choice for a swordsman, as the legendary samurai Musashi Miyamoto had some of the greatest influence on the Japanese approach to sword arts. In the game manual, Hiro is referred to as "a physical manifestation of all the traits that made the Miyamoto name legendary."
Hiro is also a direct descendant of Usagi Miyamoto, who created the daikatana in-game, which could be a reference to Usagi Yojimbo's protagonist Usagi Miyamoto.
In his book Doom Guy: Life in First Person, however, Romero notes a different source of inspiration for Hiro Miyamoto's name. Romero calls Hiro "a tribute to Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and many other seminal titles." Looking only at the heavy metal style of Romero's biggest games, Miyamoto might not seem like the most obvious influence he would choose to pay homage to, but it ultimately makes a lot of sense.
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Romero and the rest of the team at id Software were always focused on pushing technology and game design forward in conjunction, and Miyamoto's work in the 1980s was one of the biggest benchmarks for that concept during their formative years. Commander Keen, an episodic series Romero and eventual DOOM co-creators John Carmack and Tom Hall, was born of a PC port demo they created for Super Mario Bros. 3. Romero cites sword upgrades throughout Zelda games as one of his inspirations for Daikatana, and during the game's development, he got one of his sons hooked on Super Mario RPG.
John Romero’s Daikatana Was Too Little, Too Late
A Promising FPS That Lost Its Luster
Much has already been said about Daikatana over the years, but its 25th anniversary is as good a time to look at the game retrospectively as any. The biggest hurdle was simply the timeline of its release. At id Software, John Carmack's incredible technical mind and fervor had driven rapid progress for engines, and once Romero founded Ion Storm, Daikatana quickly started lagging behind. Licensing the Quake 2 engine for Daikatana forced a development reset, and by the time the game came out, even that wasn't fresh.
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Other Ion Storm games survived their long delays with less damage. Anachronox, while a commercial failure, is a well-received cult classic, and Deus Ex was a massive success. As a more focused FPS, the tech lag on Daikatana mattered more, but the game also failed to deliver the tight design that characterized Romero's previous FPS hits. The game was infamously buggy and frustrating, problems that fan patches ultimately did the work of addressing.
Most of Daikatana's critical reception focused more on its mediocrity than any sense of abject failure, but the game had done itself no favors prior to release. An infamous "John Romero's About To Make You His B***h" ad made public perception an uphill battle, and a few reviews weren't afraid to be particularly harsh. In the cons section of its review, Computer Gaming World (available via the Internet Archive) said "most of the time it just hurts to play." In issue 201's scathing year-end roundup, the magazine took things a step further, ultimately declaring Daikatana an "execrable piece of garbage."
Miyamoto Inspired Plenty Of Better Games
Daikatana Is Barely A Footnote
Shigeru Miyamoto's Daikatana namesake has ultimately done nothing to tarnish his legacy, and Romero's character is much more thoroughly forgotten than the Nintendo legend. While it's inevitable that some rough releases will cite Miyamoto as an inspiration, plenty of great games bear his influence. The immediacy of Super Mario Bros. is perhaps even more present in DOOM than in Daikatana, for example, to say nothing of the Commander Keen lineage.
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It's hard to even imagine what Nintendo's competition would look like without Miyamoto first reshaping the industry. When the SEGA Genesis crashed onto the scene as Nintendo's biggest challenger, Sonic the Hedgehog was largely defined by its opposition to Mario. Even the less resounding successes created under Miyamoto have often created their own legacies. While Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link isn't the most popular title in the Zelda franchise, the team behind Hollow Knight cited it as the game that brought them together.
Zelda 2's divisiveness is still a far cry from the total lack of enthusiasm that surrounded Daikatana's release, but there's always a chance that Daikatana could ultimately accomplish something similar. Retro-inspired boomer shooters have taken off as a modern subgenre, and it's not particularly hard to imagine one bearing the influence of Daikatana on its sleeve. For now, however, Daikatana remains an unfortunate mark on John Romero's legendary career and a minor, tangential footnote to the mark that Shigeru Miyamoto made on the gaming industry.
