Comment by cubefox

Yeah, Romero seemed too ambitious. I didn't play the original Daikatana, but the Game Boy Color port was surprisingly good. The basic 2D graphics of the system helped enforce technical simplicity. So an undisciplined game designer could actually go nuts (within the technical limitations of a tile-based 8-bit machine) without much risk of overwhelming programmers or artists.

However, the GBC game wasn't actually developed by Romero's team, but outsourced to the Japanese studio Kemco. Romero was involved, though I'm not sure how much.

Anyway, what made the GBC game unique is that it played like a linear story-driven first-person game, similar to Half-Life, just not in first-person.

The presentation was top-down, like Zelda Link's Awakening, but the world wasn't split into an overworld and dungeons, nor was it split into "levels". Instead you would just walk from location to location, where side paths would be blocked off, similar to Half-Life. On the way you were solving environmental (story related) puzzles, killing enemies, meeting allies, all while advancing the elaborate plot through occasional dialog scenes. It felt pretty modern, like playing an action thriller.

For some reason I never saw another 2D game which played like that. I assume one reason is that this type of story-driven action game was only invented with Half-Life (1998), at which point 2D games were already out of fashion on PC and home consoles. Though this doesn't explain why it didn't catch on for mobile consoles.

So in conclusion, I think Romero (his own studio) might have been better off developing ambitious 2D action adventures for constrained mobile consoles rather than trying the same on more challenging 3D hardware. It would have been a nice niche that no other team occupied at the time, to my knowledge.