Jet Li’s Rise To Honor is a 2004 PS2 beat 'em up with a unique control style. All your face buttons are useless, hope you like your analog sticks and shoulder buttons! The gameplay is a bit simple but it’s alright! The difficulty curves and lack of enemy distinction cause some frustration and some of the game mechanics are poorly implemented, but hey, I’ll try to avoid getting too negative. I’ve played through recently so I’ll manage! It’s a fairly short kung fu adventure romp that tries to play like a movie. It kinda works! Plus I mean kicking people in the face never gets old???
Jet Li plays our hero, Kit Yun, a bodyguard/enforcer for a Hong Kong crime boss named Chiang. Events transpire that will take him from the waters of Hong Kong to the sunny shores of San Francisco, and then back again for a roaring finale! So please join me as we RISE TO HONOR!
PS2 era games are always a great choice for an LP. The combat system seems like it could work well for mass melee, similar to The Mark of Kri or the Batman Arkham games with some of the middle steps cut out
Oh damn, I almost half-remember all the hubbub when this game came out. This came out in the middle of Jet Li’s peak in the West, after his appearances in Lethal Weapon 4, Romeo Must Die, Cradle 2 The Grave, The One, and Hero (which, due to constant delays by the American distributor, wouldn’t come out until two years after its Chinese debut, so it came out later the same year as Rise to Honour). I never owned a PS2, so I missed this entirely. I’m definitely interested in seeing how this turned out.
I kinda feel like I gotta apologize a bit for this LP, folks. It’s an idea I had maybe a year or two back and finally got around to and it just did not hold up to the quality I was hoping to put forth. Rise to Honor is sort of an example of “neat concept, poor framework”. The control scheme is a neat idea but the underlying encounters and everything are kinda stale. It’s a neat kung fu movie if nothing else, but aside from the twin stick control concept everything else kinda sucks. It’s not even a crazy neat kung fu movie. Also I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm I was hoping to get, it turned into kvetching by the end and man I hate it when I do that.
Anyway! This is the final episode, and I’m already at work on the next LP which will have just a ~tiny~ bit more work put into it on my side.
