Daikatana Review

Daikatana is the pilot episode of the JonTron Show, released in 2010. It is a two-part episode where Jon provides a fairly straight-forward analysis of the infamous game. It notably lacks the polish seen in nearly all later videos.

Plot
It should be noted that this episode doesn't necessarily have the plot to speak of. It is more rather a straight-forward game review with some jokes slapped on. However, that won't stop us from telling you anyways.

Part 1
Starting off the episode, Jon, after a lengthy staredown with the game's boxart on a television screen, asks the viewers what could be said about Daikatana. Jon digresses and begins to talk about the game in detail. He tells us that he has never directly affiliated with the game prior to the review, only have second-hand knowledge of it on account of his affinity for games by id Software and John Romero. As such, for the review, he will be going in blind.

Jon brings up the game's troubled history of ambition and arrogance. He brings up the well-known fact that John Romero forced his team to port Daikatana from the Quake Engine to the Quake II engine, before forcing them to restart work entirely when the process proved troublesome. His arrogance even leads to an infamous advertisement found on various publications, including, at one point, Playboy. Said advert states, "John Romero is about to make you his bitch. Suck it down."

While Jon makes the dubious quality of the game known, he takes it a step further and uses the Nintendo 64 version of the game, which has muddier visuals, no voice acting, MIDI audio, as well as being unwatchable in comparison to the PC version. Starting off, Jon is immediately abhorred by the presentation, criticizing the game's visuals and music. Shortly thereafter, he is sat in front of an 11-minute intro cutscene, possibly more bearable in the PC version due to there being voice acting, but here, it's nothing but borderline stills with text at the bottom. He tries to translate this method of storytelling over to Doom, with horrid results.

Jon summarizes the story of the game, while also criticizing the main character, Hiro Miyamoto, before actually beginning the gameplay. Once in, Jon is optimistic that it won't be too bad. However, he reaches his first hurdle when he realizes how precise he has to be with his starting gun, coupled with the N64's poor aiming controls, and how small some of the enemies are, makes for a mess from the get-go. Jon even accidentally kills an enemy when a shot misses and hits the fusebox behind it.

Afterward, he begins going on about the game's RPG elements, showcasing a Level Up notification that only appears for a couple of seconds. He's quick to criticize the phrase, "Now go kick butt!" that is displayed as part of the Level Up message. Jon then comes to a dead end in the form of a low-hanging door that you'd assume could be crouched under. However, Jon is unable to find a crouch control either by messing with all of the buttons or looking in the game's control menu. He begins backtracking, likely either to find a control tutorial or a way to open the door all the way. He eventually gives up entirely and looks it up, finding that you can crouch, you just have to do it in an arbitrary way (pressing A and R), which wouldn't have been so bad if there was a tutorial of some kind in the game that detailed this fact. Jon is infuriated at this because of the fact that, had he been younger without internet access when he played the game, he very well could have gotten stuck in the opening three minutes of the game.

Jon then jumps to criticize the overly tedious level design, using a specific elevator lift as an example. It travels downwards incredibly slowly and goes up much faster. Jon attempt to make a jump, only to plummet straight down to the floor and have to wait once more for the platform to lower. On the subject of tedium, Jon mentions the fact that the stages lack mid-level checkpoints, forcing you to restart the stage from the beginning should you die. He's especially critical of a conveyor belt section with lasers that suffers from a lack of mercy invincibility, coupled with the lasers being too close together to properly avoid, this causes Jon to take continuous damage, which in turn causes him to mistime a jump and fall under the platform, forcing him to try again, this time with only 4 HP.

Jon then is confronted by the jumbled grunts of Superfly Johnson, one of the game's side characters, and goes to find that he's being tortured. Jon goes to find the source of the machine's power and stumbles upon some dopey, indifferent NPCs that die in one hit. He finds their presence to be distracting since they don't react to him at all. Once he kills them all, Superfly is freed of his torture, but still remains imprisoned within the torture chamber, informing Jon that the key card to release him is back the way Jon came, behind a Mishima logo. Jon goes there, frustrated, and doesn't realize he's supposed to blast open the sign to get to the key card.

Once he does, Jon is greeted to a cutscene of Hiro and Superfly escaping the area, but because the graphics are so muddled, he doesn't recognize either character. Jon then gets real with the viewers for a moment. Claiming that he's about to show them all something that is indicative to the rest of the game. Jon starts off the level, goes to a panel, and opens the door. He walks down the hallway and sees an enemy around the corner. He shoots said enemy and proceeds to the next panel. Said panel rejects Jon's attempt to use it, so Jon backtracks to the first room. He sees an NPC there and, in a knee-jerk reaction, he shoots the guy dead. Without realizing that this NPC was supposed to open the door for Jon, he's left to wander the stage forever until the NPC respawns. The NPC slowly makes his way to the terminal and opens the door, finally letting Jon progress.

Jon takes a moment to note what the NPC says to him, and then he goes on to note how unintentionally humorous a lot of the NPC dialogue is in this game. It's all standard, poorly-written dialogue and such, however, the crowning jewel is an NPC who states that "Computers today is easy to use." which causes Jon to throw a fit, mainly because the game was made in America. The last NPC speaks about his wages, and Jon, shrugs, confused as to whether the man is being sincere or making a joke. Either way, the video ends abruptly, cutting Jon off mid-sentence, where the second video immediately picks up from. The next NPC states that "Life's a drag." and Jon legitimately shows sympathy towards the man.

Part 2
Jon then begins to show signs of liking the game, only for things to happen that just ruin the good moments, such as falling through an unfinished floor panel to a lower area. He does go on to state that he does enjoy the game's environments to a degree, as well as talk about all of the game's different weapons, something that he, as a Doom fan, does truly enjoy.

Once Jon finishes gushing over the game's weapons, however, he returns to being critical. At the end of world 1, he finds and retrieves Daikatana without so much as an elite mook to guard it. He then states that he can't take much more of the game, and gives the audience a "cliff notes" version of the following stages.

Stage two is a Greek-inspired locale where the player fights a Naga, which doesn't impress Jon, as she goes down in couple shots from Jon's favorite weapon, the Shot Cycler. The following cutscene features Mikiko Ebihara, whom Jon doesn't recognize at all. He then goes on to talk about how the PC version had, as a selling point, AI companions to accompany you throughout the game. Superfly and Mikiko are some of these companions. Notorious in the PC version for being incredibly stupid, running into walls and such, that they were removed from the N64 version, but left in the cutscenes.

Stage three is styled like a medieval kingdom. Jon approaches an NPC in a throne and compares him to The Tick. He then aggressively shoots the guy, but nothing happens. With no way out, Jon proceeds to kill himself in the game by firing rockets at the floor. He uses a cheat to skip to stage four.

Stage four, the final stage, is set in Alcatraz prison. Jon immediately criticizes the stage's aesthetic. He grabs a weapon, specifically a Glock 2020, which bothers Jon for some reason. He then confronts the stage's enemies, which are inmates of the prison. And they are always oddly doing push-ups before Jon properly encounters them. Interestingly, they bleed purple like all other enemies in the game, though it's more evident because they look the most like normal people compared to the other enemies and NPCs.

Jon enters a jail cell to find an inmate asleep. He then gets up and gives Jon an item. Jon is distracted by how poor quality the man's face is. Jon then gets through the final gauntlet with relative ease before encountering the final boss, Kage Mishima. Brandishing Daikatana, Jon...strafes around the guy and swings his sword constantly, defeating Kage with relative ease and leaving him performing the Howie scream as he dies.

Jon becomes audibly upset at how easily the final boss went down, going over the fundamentals of the topic. He even brings up the Icon of Sin from Doom II as an example of how to properly make a final boss. He also brings up the fact that there is a bonus final boss but laments that it's just more of the same. With that, he's treated to the game's ending cutscene in which the characters have a reunion, and the game attempts to give us some light humor involving a man trying to lift an incredibly heavy crate and ultimately failing to so.

Ultimately, Jon's spirit is crushed and he now understands why Daikatana, as a game, is so maligned. He ends off the video with the moral that we are not defined by our mistakes. And to hate John Romero for Daikatana in spite of his other great games is like hating Bill Cosby for Leonard Part 6, or hating George Lucas for Howard the Duck. And while Jon is quick to point out the many other reasons to hate George Lucas, his video was made before the allegations against Bill Cosby that made everyone in America hate him...Perhaps that's a topic for another day...Anyways, the video ends with Jon promising more to come, and Jacques ordering the audience to subscribe or die, then stating he likes yum-yum.

Trivia

 * This episode, being the pilot, has notable differences from the rest of the series. These differences include:
 * The episode being split despite only a single game being covered. Future multi-part videos have had multiple games or other media to cover, making the split videos make a bit more sense.
 * This was due to the 15-minute video length limit imposed by YouTube for new YouTubers.
 * His successive Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness video was also cut into parts during the early days of his channel.
 * The first video of Jon's to surpass this limit was Starfox Adventures: Stairfax Temperatures, the show's sixth episode.
 * The episode suffers from very poor video quality, noticeably poor audio quality, and cheap, After Effects editing tropes.
 * The episode's logo is very different from the following two that would be used for the channel.
 * The thumbnail for both parts of the video use stills from within the episodes as opposed to professionally-made thumbnails.
 * Jon's signature vulgar humor, while present, is much more subdued. He altogether behaves in a much more grounded, calm, and soft-spoken manner than what would come to be expected of him later on.
 * The episode has no proper closing and the opening between the two parts, they just abruptly cut off and pick up from one another.
 * The intro also features Jon walking down a street in California, and the slideshow overlayed on his and Jacques's silhouettes do not properly sync up with the music.
 * Though it likely doesn't need to be stated, this is indeed the debut episode of both Jon and Jacques.
 * This is the first multi-part episode, and one of only two multi-part episodes to only cover a single piece of media.
 * This episode is referenced in the Stairfax Temperatures episode, which was released for the first-year anniversary of the series.
 * This episode is riddled with a variety of minor errors, including:
 * When Jon is talking about how Doom had scared him as a kid, he makes two small errors when referencing the Mancubus enemy. The first is that the Mancubus never appeared in the first Doom, and made its debut in Doom II. The second is the fact that the proper plural form of the enemy's name is "Mancubi" and not "Mancubuses" as Jon refers to them in the video.
 * Jon feels the need to note that John Romero and John Carmack are of no relation to one another. In America, at least, first names are not used to relate two people, that's what the surname is for. This could be intended as a joke, however.
 * Jon mistakenly forgets that Superfly told him that the key card is behind the Mishima logo. Jon even reads this back almost verbatim before going on to complain that the key card wasn't beneath the Mishima logo. With no way to walk around the logo, one would be able to deduce that the logo needed to be destroyed. In other words, Jon was the source of his own frustration here...at least a little bit.
 * Jon then immediately complains that he doesn't know either of the characters in the following cutscene, despite one of them obviously being Hiro, with the text even confirming it. The other character is Superfly, whom Jon had just rescued. If anything, it does at least contribute to his claim that the graphics are terrible.
 * The creator of the song "Tetris GB (Game A)" was unaware of the song's inclusion in the video until randomly discovering it on April 30, 2021. The song plays in the background of Jon's explanation of the game's history, at exactly 1:37 of Part 1.
 * It's come to my attention that the source of the above info is a LYING FUCK and that the actual story is that the composer didn't really have any idea how big Jon would become after using the song in his first big video. Oh sweet innocence, how yee reward us so~