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.