YMMV / Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

• Contested Sequel: While the game has its fans, the game is viewed as one of the weaker installments. Especially compared to Medal of Honor: Frontline and Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game got a rather lukewarm reception in the West, but it found itself surprisingly popular in Japan, of all places. It helps that Big Bad turns out to be a corrupt general who intends to use stolen gold as a bribe for support.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Probably not the last time that Mako would play a high ranking imperial officer.
• Nightmare Fuel: Listen closely after the USS Arizona gets bombed. When your boat starts cruising through its remains and that horrifying ocean of bodies, you can hear some of them still screaming. It's easier to listen to with the game's score turned off and with headphones.
• Obvious Beta: Has its share of obvious bugs all throughout the campaign and the story itself often lacks focus, introducing and then doing away with plot elements that simply don't amount to much in the long run, which probably contributed to the game's lukewarm reception.
• One-Scene Wonder: A rare non-human example; the famed Browning Automatic Rifle which was a favorite among US forces during the war only appears in the first level during the Pearl Harbor attack, where it is used against the attacking planes where its effectiveness is drastically reduced. What a terrible waste.
• So Okay, It's Average: Many critics and gamers praise the story for branching out to the Pacific, but these same people will also rightly complain about the many bugs and glitches present in the game. The unlockable content is something that incites the player to replay the game, and the multiplayer does support bots for more action, but the graphics are very much a step-down. The result is something that's definitely not a horrible experience, but something that also isn't remarkable in and of itself.
• Special Effects Failure: Many Japanese soldiers suffer from poor AI, often failing to fire their weapons when they have their guns fixed on a target or failing to finish a bayonet attack against the player.
  • Even by 2003 standards, the graphics were often not quite up to par with other games to come out at that time, and the game has no shortage of visible animation errors.
• That One Level: Midnight Raid on Guadalcanal is particularly hated by the fans for its overly dark and unintuitive map design, which resulted in many fans finding themselves got lost when trying to find the next objective. Combined with the aforementioned not-quite-up-to-par graphics, it's easy to find players who had to resort to walkthroughs, unlike other missions.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A non-character example, despite being set in the Pacific and several rare Japanese guns showing up used by the enemy (Such as the Type 26 Revolver), only two Japanese LM Gs and Japanese Grenades are actually usable by the player as normal weapons, no rifles, pistols or even SM Gs (Since it was cut) can actually be used by the player at all, even a good chunk of the Allied weapons are only used in the first few levels and never used again.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The mission "Singapore Sling" introduces a plot by the Japanese to install a rogue Soviet general as Stalin's replacement and thus turn the Soviet Union over to the cause of the Axis Powers. Said general vanishes after the level and nothing further is said of this plan, which presumably would've been addressed in the aborted sequel.