Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

Electronic Arts Los Angeles

images c/o MobyGames (PlayStation 2 version)

I think about World War II games a lot. World War II as a theme is something of a guilty pleasure of mine, despite its oversaturation in media (especially video games and tabletop wargames) and despite its status as a Traditionally Masculine Interest (inasmuch as such a thing can exist.) And one thing I’ve noticed is just how little attention the Pacific theater has gotten over the years, especially in the first person shooter arena. The obvious question is “why?” But the answer isn’t so obvious. The simplest reason, one that explains both the paucity of video game appearances and general disinterest in Hollywood, pretty much boils down to the very subjective view of “because it wouldn’t be fun” — the same reason World War I and Vietnam don’t get a lot of coverage either. From a gameplay perspective, asymmetrical warfare is tricky to get right; from a storytelling perspective, all of these conflicts are too bleak, too morally murky. It’s easy to sell the European front — really, the Western front, without its murky Stalin vs. Hitler politics — because it’s easy to write simplistic good vs. evil narratives. After all, Nazis are the ultimate bad guys: you can do whatever you want to them and not feel bad about it. It’s the perfect Hollywood fodder, especially if you start the story at the end of the war with the Allied invasion of western Europe. It’s not so easy on the other side of the war: Japan was just as cruel as the Nazis, with atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, the Bataan Death March, and more, but America did not come out of the Pacific war clean either: internment camps, deep-seated anti-Japanese racism, taking trophies off of dead Japanese troops, widespread rape in Okinawa and later occupied Japan, and, of course, dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Pacific theater was two juggernaut empires, maddened by mutual hatred, crashing into each other over a boiling soup of naval battles and bloody struggles for a series of lifeless rocks.

Medal of Honor: Rising Sun is a story about the Pacific theater.

As the fifth mainline Medal of Honor game in the series (and the fourth developed by Electronic Arts Los Angeles, née Dreamworks Interactive) Rising Sun is as Medal of Honor as they come in the pre-Call of Duty era. Most of the gameplay feels more like Goldeneye 64 than Call of Duty; there’s no ADS, no blood. Even the more traditional combat sequences — one level has you taking part in the Makin Atoll raid, another has you tracking down an artillery battery on Guadalcanal — are somewhat different, less action-packed, than Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault’s desperate attempts at feeling like the then-recent Call of Duty. And after your character, U.S. Marine Joe Griffin, gets picked up by the OSS, it fully falls back to that Goldeneye 64-style gameplay the series built itself on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; one mission midway through the game, ‘Singapore Sling,’ has you infiltrating occupied Singapore to spy on a gathering of high-level Axis leaders, and it’s one of my favorite levels in any game.

Of course, by this point, the wheels had started to come off on the Medal of Honor machine. Allied Assault was a big hit on PC, but Medal of Honor always has been traditionally a console-based series, and with Rising Sun, the quality was starting to dip. I found the controls to be a struggle; aiming was imprecise at best, most easily demonstrated with mounted machine guns where sweeping it in any direction won’t guarantee that you hit anything as the actual point you’re aiming at seems to jump from point to point if you move too fast. The AI is also pretty anemic, slow to react and often just stupid; this can ironically be a blessing with the finicky aiming, allowing you to draw a bead on the enemy with your slow-moving and jumpy reticle while they freeze up and try to do the same to you.

It’s also surprisingly short, with just eight missions (with the obligatory Pearl Harbor chapter being a two-parter,) all of which can be handled in about an hour or less. The ongoing story thread, about Joe’s captured brother and the villainous Commander Shima using stolen Asian gold to fund his personal projects, is unfortunately severed forever, as Rising Sun didn’t do well enough to get a sequel. This is perhaps the surest sign that EA Los Angeles were biting off more than they could chew with this series: with the bosses at EA demanding a new Medal of Honor game every year since 1999, and two coming out in 2002 alone, not to mention a bunch of former Allied Assault devs running off to start their own studio, the series was starting to wear thin. The result: getting absolutely steamrolled by Call of Duty and other competitors in the World War II shooter arena.

I always have a bad feeling in my gut whenever Hollywood and western game developers try to tell stories about the Pacific war. Why? Because we have a hard time not being jingoistic racists about it. And that’s why it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about Rising Sun’s story. Like all victors in war, America is historically self-aggrandizing with regards to its role in World War II, and historically has painted itself as the aggrieved party, with full justification for vengeance against Japan. A lot of hash is made in Rising Sun about Japanese atrocities; if you watch the veteran interviews (which must be unlocked), they talk a lot about the stuff Japan did to captured soldiers, some of which the interviewees experienced personally. Obviously this is all part of history, but in a game released just two years after 9/11, it feels weird; it feels like clinging to old grudges to justify new ones. Think about it: that godawful Michael Bay Pearl Harbor movie was a box office bomb, but then 9/11 happened and it became a DVD darling. In 2003, 9/11 was still a fresh wound in the American psyche, and while I don’t have hard data on when Rising Sun began development, average development time around then was typically a year or two. Similar to how Pearl Harbor was used to justify discrimination and imprisonment of Japanese people, 9/11 sent Islamophobia through the fucking roof and it has never, ever come back down. The fucked up thing? It’s 2025 and people still use Pearl Harbor to justify being racists — from people saying the Fukushima nuclear disaster was “karma” for Pearl Harbor (I dunno, I think America got them back pretty good by nuking Japan twice) to as recently as Israel invoking it to justify the Gaza genocide! You see how this shit is all bound up like a nest of snakes?

Political implications aside, while I don’t hate Medal of Honor: Rising Sun half as much as I did Pacific Assault, it is a mixed bag at best. The gameplay is just too messy, too simplistic, to be really enjoyable; the problem with Goldeneye clones is the same problem with Goldeneye: too much a product of pre-Half-Life design sensibilities, but lacking that important something that made more straightforward shooters like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D fun. It doesn’t even have the distinction of being the first FPS set in the Pacific theater, being beat out by the Platoon Leader expansion for WWII GI in 1999. In short, it’s just another forgotten chapter in the long, messy history of the franchise that walked so Call of Duty could run.

 

Part of a series on Medal of Honor 

Medal of Honor	Medal of Honor: Underground
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
MOHAA: Spearhead	MOHAA: Breakthrough
Medal of Honor: Frontline	Medal of Honor: Rising Sun
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault	Medal of Honor: European Assault
Medal of Honor: Heroes	Medal of Honor: Heroes 2
Medal of Honor: Vanguard	Medal of Honor: Airborne
Medal of Honor (2010)	Medal of Honor: Warfighter
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond