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Medal Of Honor - Rising Sun Readied For Japan

Thanks to GameSpot for its coverage regarding EA's imminent launch of Medal Of Honor - Rising Sun for PS2 and GameCube in Japan, and the correspondent's observation that the game's "portrayal of [the] Pacific campaign, where Japan suffered losses, [is] politely overlooked, but not by all." A review in Japanese publication Softbank Games is referenced, which reads: "This game is set in the Pacific, where deadly combat between the Japanese Imperial Army and the American Army unfolds", and GameSpot's correspondent finds "no indication that the reviewer finds anything unusual about playing as a U.S. soldier trying to defeat the WWII-era Japanese army." Other Japanese gamers surveyed had other opinions, with one suggesting that "...this is a game in which you play as a foreign soldier and try to kill troops from your own country. I bet that you couldn't even sell a game like this overseas."

7 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. rising sun - behind the scenes by hookedup · · Score: 5, Informative

    on EA's official site they have a couple 'making of' videos here which were kind of interesting.

    I saw the commercial the other day and coulnt believe my eyes, quite the impressive looking game.

  2. Re:"...this is a game in which you play as a forei by eht · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or Return to Castle Wolfenstein where you can play as German vs US forces, or Battlefield 1942 again where you can play as a Japanese attacking US forces, yeah, those kind of games don't sell at all.

    Gamespy stats seems to indicate other though. By the way, the second most popular mod for Half-Life is a WW2 mod where you can play as Germans.

  3. Exactly! by GeorgeH · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "...this is a game in which you play as a foreign soldier and try to kill troops from your own country. I bet that you couldn't even sell a game like this overseas."
    I couldn't have said it better myself. Now I'm going to go play SOCOM (or Counter-Strike) and hope that I don't get stuck on the terrorist side.
    --
    Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
  4. Re:"...this is a game in which you play as a forei by zulux · · Score: 5, Informative

    There Japanese were nowhere near as monstrous as the Third Reich.

    The Japanese were *WERSE* than the Third Reich.

    From sjwar.com

    Killed over 35 million
    Massacred over 300,000 civilians in 6-8 weeks in Nanjing
    Forced hundred of thousands to become slave laborers/sex slaves
    Committed biochemical warfare in labs and battlefields over 2,700 times, causing countless deaths, and intentionally flouted the Treaty of Geneva
    Dissected over 3,000 live humans without anesthesia for biochemical experiments
    Never punished most war criminals; they became key government, business, and academic leaders

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  5. The losing side... by MMaestro · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I think this game helps show that games should let players play on the losing side more often. We've all played as the super hero space marine that takes on the forces of hell single-handedly (Doom), we've played the anti-social kid turned hero (FF8), and we've all played some faceless, mysterous, nameless, gender undefined, jack-of-all-trades, appeared out of nowhere person who ends up saying the world (text based games, Ultima, and countless others).

    What I'd like to see is a game where you're a U.S. soldier during the early stages of the WWII Battle of the Bulge and you're actually running away from tank divisions rather than cutting through hundreds of mindless, deaf guards. I wanna play as a German soldier during WWII trying to get to the western front to avoid being captured by the Russians. I think games like this would be a nice change of pace from the standard "one-man army" type of games we've been seeing for a while (yes Call of Duty featured a large number of allies to help you but you ended up doing most of the work anyway.)

  6. Re:"...this is a game in which you play as a forei by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have no qualms playing as terrorists in Counterstrike. In fact I actually prefer it (mostly due to this bogus war on imaginary terrorists threats around the world

    +1, True. Sigh.

    But in WW2 games, no, I agree with you. It's tough to get any enjoyment playing murdering bastards.

    I dunno. I guess that on a leadership level, perhaps the Germans were nastier (at an individual level, as nicely illustrated in Saving Private Ryan, everybody was busy playing hardball). The US imprisoned mass numbers of Japanese US citizens...but they didn't kill them. The Nazis imprisoned, and toward the end of the war, began mass exeuctions of Jews.

    However, nobody's hands were exactly clean in WWII, either. The Japanese did some awful things to territories they conqered. The Allies (I believe it was Britain and the United States) were the ones to begin strategic mass killing of civilians on the opposing side by carpet-bombing nonmilitary, purely civilian areas. The United States developed the atomic bomb and dropped it on two cities, obliterating everyone. There's a pretty reasonable argument that these bombs were dropped more to benefit post-war negotiations than to win the war -- Japanese politicians were trying to figure out a graceful exit strategy, and Russia was considering entering the fight.

    That being said, I don't see any problem in playing a video game as either side -- I prefer playing the Germans to the Allied forces in Close Combat because of the different play style. It's a video game, and people shouldn't lose sight of that. In various games, I've played a mad leader starting atomic wars, a demon, a vampire, a human-slaughtering horde of aliens, and an undead voodoo warrior. In the majority of video game plots, there is no (or very little) regard for human life. Characters get killed, generally in unpleasant ways. The thing is that people should simply keep sight of the fact that you are *playing a video game*. You should be able to watch Das Boot or play the DM in Dungeon Siege without problems -- you're changing the positions of some polygons and manipulating a bit of memory. Folks would do well not to lose sight of that.

    Remember the original Brothers Grimm fairytales. Before they were prettied up for a more modern audience, they were quite gory. Cinderella's stepsisters, for instance, deliberately and on the spot cut away large pieces of their feet to shove their feet into slippers...and when (the spirit of) Cinderella's dead mother notices the blood pouring from the shoes, she rips the stepsisters' eyeballs out. Somehow, parents didn't have a problem telling their kids all this (until recently). Today's society is not more violent that it once was. Our sensibilities have just been tightened a bit.

  7. Sickening... by dancingmad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The level of racism that's come up because of this discussion is, to say the least, mildly disturbing. The story is about Japanese gamers and their take on this FPS. So what if Japanese people don't want to play it, it's their preogative.

    Did the Japanese do awful things during the war? Of course; I'm from Bangladesh and my grandparents ran on foot from from Burma back to Bangladesh, leaving most of their wealth over there. My girlfriend is Okinawan and her grandparents had to hide in caves during the Battle of Okinawa. She's a part of the Japanese education system and she knows went on during the war, more than most American kids know about anything their beacon of democracy has done (Hello, Iranian Revolution? Wheeling and dealing in South America? Killing civilizans in Iraq and Afghanistan? Atomic weapons in Japan?). But American and the west have done PLENTY of horrible things in Asia (and there's a line of thought that Japanese involvement in WWII is a direct response to brutal Western colonialism in the East).

    History is written by the winners; no one's saying "Damn, we don't get to burn May Lai to the ground and rape Vietnamese women in games from that war." But that stuff happened (American vets would be as mad as Japanese people would be). If you want to talk about white washing, let's go play some America's Army or some other piece of crap where the brave American solider protects us from those dirty brown people.

    I'm not some anime fanboy saying Japan is the perfect society; it's not and the Japanese government should apologize for war time atrocities, and the government should do more for the desdendants of Korean laborers. But a lot of bigoted people here on ./ seem to forget how badly Americans have treated and do treat Native Americans and Africans, how the Brits treat former subjects from the Indian subcontient.

    --
    "There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)