Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

I remember playing this as a little kid and not being able to beat the first level. Once you've escorted a tank commander, he orders you from his turret to go and destroy a radio station. Though I might have been not too bright as a kid, I remember growing super fucking frustrated at the fact I couldn't actually tell what he was saying, and though I could barely read then, the hints the game had given gave minimal assistance. The instructions are told in heavily compressed audio mashed alongside intensively earaping sounding bombing runs and gunfire. The path to the radio is fucked. I mean, and seriously mean, it is FUCKED. There's no genuine level design to attract you to the path you need to take. Routes are hidden and there are little shitter paths leading you down alleys that while contain enemy troops, actually lead to fuck all. Not only that, but the completion of objectives will be dependent on whether or not you'd bothered to hop onto what appeared to be optional machine gun emplacements.

The level design gets better near the end of the game but it retains that level of perpetual jank. There's always some ten or twenty stupid minutes you'll spend at some point looking for a narrow and covered path in a wall, or one part of an objective you can't find that you need to activate to progress. The levels aren't difficult besides their design failures. Enemies fire (what I think are) projectile bullets, meaning you can dodge them by swerving left and right. Even if they manage to hit you, they'll only knock 3% of your health at most. That's on top of the fact that if you're at somewhat of a distance, the Japanese won't even bother to target you, meaning, if you just enter an area you can effectively take out all of the machine gun nests with relative ease. This had to of been a design reaction to Frontline's assblast difficulty in it's latter missions, as the level design here seems to ensure that the player will never face an overwhelming, hell, any challenge during the game.

There's a lack of spirit here that the other Medal of Honor games of this era contained. A lack of attention to detail, of thoughtful level design, of a beautiful ★★★★★ soundtrack, a lack of the faithful composition which eternalized the names of the other entries of this series into the minds of the people who'd played them. This game... this game is seriously fucked. Despite that, it's worth (well, at least to me), suffering through. You'll find yourself laughing at things the silly M1911 reload animation which has your character lightly tapping the slide catch with his left pointer finger, the massively compressed audio which sounds like they'd invented a digital hammer just to smash the dialogue and music a little more than they could already manage with their soundboard, and all of the littler moments like the return of the knife throwing chefs and banzai backwards-summersaulting Japanese Officers, and although the levels were rushed to completion in the span of a single year, they still contain (albeit a shell of) the unique artistry that existed in games prior.

I remember my friend getting this for what I think was his 12th birthday, I remember it pretty well. When I first moved to my new neighborhood one of the first friends I made was a kid who lived across the street who was a little bit of a trouble maker and he would ride his bike around and was a huge gamer and into movies too. Anyway he was living with his mother and they ended up moving somewhere else after about 2 years, and after a few months they moved again without telling us and when we tried calling it wouldn't work. So randomly almost 2 years without hearing from him, he called me and told me where he moved and we started hanging out again, so that Summer for his birthday he invited me to his place to spend the night, he lived in a pretty small apartment with his mom and brother and sister, but I did and I remember one of his gifts he got that day was Medal of Honor Rising Sun for his birthday, and then later that day he went to the store and got Spider-Man 2 the game, so that night after he got home from his karate, we played both those games. I'll admit Rising Sun sort of bored me and I just wanted to play Spider-Man 2, which we did, we played that game almost all night until we beat the game at around 7 or 8 in the morning. Then the next day we played this game, and well like I said I wasn't really into shooters or war games at the time.

Then years down the road, at least 3 or 4 years later, we got the Medal of Honor collection on PS2, and at this point I had played a few shooters like Call of Duty 3 and Resistance Fall of Man. Anyway Rising Sun was my least favorite of the 3 games, it just had the most generic design, it was basically Medal of Honor but in Asia. Sure there were some remotely cool moments like fighting off Alligators on the raft, going to the palace in Singapore, and gunning down enemies in the tank. But it wasn't as memorable or good as Frontline or European Assault and it played like a generic FPS game with pretty bad level design and a forgettable story.