America is back – Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

**Medal of Honor: Rising Sun** (EA, PlayStation 2, 2003)

The most disgusted I remember my parents ever being in response to kids TV was during an episode of Warner Brothers animation Steven Spielberg Presents Freakazoid!. In the episode, the titular superhero travelled through a time vortex, turned away Japanese aeroplanes from Pearl Harbor in 1941 and proudly declared that he had prevented World War II. My mum’s response came instantly: World War II was already happening, that was just when the Americans got involved. Given that the episode involved an alternate history which ended up with a mouse as US president, Freakazoid! was clearly not meant to be taken entirely seriously. But she had a point, and the misleading moment has stuck in my memory as an early example of something I’ve seen many times since.

As an outsider, the America-centred viewpoint was jarring and obvious. It often is. As a straight white man there are not a lot of times when I feel excluded from an assumed default, but if I ever want to get a slither of what that feels like, I can turn to every time someone online acts like everyone is American until specified otherwise — every time they ask “which state are you in?” to someone who isn’t in any of them. Super Chart Island is in part a response to histories of video games treating the American experience as the only significant one and doing things like writing about the video game crash of 1983 without any acknowledgement that it was a local phenomenon. Of course, mainstream American perspectives, of history or otherwise, frequently leave out plenty of Americans too.

It’s easy to see the thought process which took World War II first person shooter series Medal of Honor, which also started out as a Steven Spielberg presentation, to the slice of history that makes up Rising Sun. The immense success of Medal of Honor: Frontline had been boosted by the cinematic drama of its first level set in the Normandy landings, and EA needed something to match up to that. Like Hollywood a couple of years earlier, they turned to Pearl Harbor. And having done so, for thematic consistency, a game set in the Pacific war made sense, and so Rising Sun which has you as an American soldier fighting against Japan across the Philippines, Solomon Islands, Singapore, Burma and Thailand.

The Pearl Harbor section is spectacular. It starts off below-deck on a ship and as you fight your way past fires and chaos, it carefully builds anticipation. It is a long time before you finally emerge out to a vista of angry red and black skies, planes and explosive plumes of water all around. You then get a mission on a small boat escorting battleships and shooting down planes, vulnerability and destruction emphasised all the more. It sets the tone for a game which makes more of its combination of first person immersion and blockbuster production values than ever. The Guadalcanal mission which has you making your way into the jungle at night makes particularly great use of tension, both in the boat you slowly float in, sniping faint targets in the distance, and as you fight your way through the confusing dark, each glimpse of the moon in the sky a blessed relief. In making such spectacular use of fixed set pieces, Rising Sun also keeps you on rails which are hard to ignore, everything neatly channeled. When it comes to the overarching narrative, it’s a similar picture.

The concept of Medal of Honor started off as a game that would inform about World War II as well as entertain, and Rising Sun makes an increased effort to highlight that information-giving role. Each mission is introduced with film footage and a narrator doing their best resonant intoning. As you finish them you can earn not just fictional letters from home from the main character’s sister, but ‘Valor in History’ videos of real veterans filmed talking about their experiences. All of these are directed to the same narrative of heroic battle against a terrible enemy. There is never any mention of how the war ended, with the US killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in a nuclear attack. The bitter irony of the voiceover about Pearl Harbor being one of history’s most devastating surprise attacks goes unremarked. Even other events in the war before Pearl Harbor that might provide context go unmentioned. There is no space for the acknowledgement of any other perspectives than a single, uncomplicated, American one.

Nuclear bombs are not the only shameful bit of history the game steers clear of. The terrible treatment of Japanese-Americans imprisoned in terrible conditions for no reason other than their race never comes up either. Rising Sun does feature a Japanese-American soldier who joins you in Singapore to provide support as a spy, though coupling him with a comedy Brit rather than any other Americans has some implications that play into racist perpetual foreigner stereotypes. Oh, and he ends up sacrificing his life for the benefit of your white hero.

It was only watching PBS’s Asian Americans documentary recently that I learned that some Japanese-Americans joined up as soldiers directly from imprisonment in internment camps. They sought to prove their unfairly questioned loyalty in the most extreme way while their families remained incarcerated. In Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, it would not have taken much to extend its letters from home to other characters, and found a way of including that detail, adding depth and historical context, but of course it didn’t. Likewise, not all of its Valor in History interviewees are American, but all of them are white. As I found with Civilization II, the superficial appearance of educational elements makes the bias of its assumptions all the more glaring.

Rising Sun got a fairly poor set of reviews at the time, although for different reasons. Several suggested that the loss of much talent to breakaway Call of Duty developers Infinity Ward was becoming all too obvious. Enemy AI came up for a lot of questioning, alongside deterioration in some even more basic elements of functionality, which I experienced too. In indicating what you need to do, Rising Sun veers between step-by-step instructions and confusing gaps in a way which Frontline did not. Several times I saw messages trigger when they clearly weren’t meant to yet, for example telling me that a gate had opened when I still needed to shoot some more people before it would. Sometimes this took the form of being given audible instructions by characters who I had not yet reached the location of, the story running on rails whether the player was on board or not.

The flaws of perspective and mechanics don’t remain completely separate. At one point in the Philippines mission you slide down a plank from a building to reach the ground behind a manned machine gun post. Kill the soldier there and you can take on the machine gun, at which point wave after wave of Japanese soldiers start charging out towards you, ready to be mown down in a cacophony of death. Or you can just walk past, and… they never emerge. The game stretches past the point of being even a loose representation of a war between humans. Those soldiers visibly don’t exist in the game except to provide you the pleasure of killing them as they rush out in futile determination.

That moment is when the racist dehumanisation of the Japanese enemy as a relentless, unthinking force becomes clearest of all. It exists in a context in which making this game was very different from making Frontline. Not because of any differential judgement between the evils of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but because Asian-American people continued (and continue) to suffer from discrimination in modern America (as East Asian people also do in Britain) in a way in which non-racialised German-Americans did not. It’s an even more acute difference in 2021 with current elevated levels of racist attacks against Asian-Americans, but the same forces were present in 2003. And EA made a game in which war is sanitised and rendered as entertainment to the point of removing any blood, but yet filled with uses of racial slurs still being used to hurt people at the time it was released. The narrow perspective isn’t just jarring, but harmful.