Rise to Honor is a 2004 Beat 'em Up game for the PlayStation 2, featuring the motion-capture performance and voice work of Jet Li. The game is more or less a playable version of your typical Hong Kong action flick. The Hero, Kit Yun, is an undercover cop assigned as a bodyguard to mob boss Chiang, who happens to be the father of his childhood friend Michelle and a friend of Kit's deceased father. However, a year into his assignment, Chiang decides to call it quits on the criminal life, much to the displeasure of his right hand man Kwan. Things quickly go to hell from there. Kit is then sent on a wild chase across Hong Kong and San Francisco, rallying Michelle and his fellow childhood friend Chi, to unravel the criminal conspiracy surrounding Chiang and his father, kicking lots of ass along the way.
The game is notable for its unconventional control scheme for its time. Whereas most games' combat systems use the face buttons, combat in Rise to Honor makes heavy use of the right analog stick instead; while the trigger buttons also play a role, the face buttons are almost completely unused. That, and Jet Li.
Rise to Honor provides examples of the following tropes:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Kit has to go through one to infiltrate Kwan's skyscraper in the final act.
- Advancing Boss of Doom: The helicopter that chases Kit across the construction site. You have to constantly run away from it while it strafes the ground with its guns; fall too far behind, and it's Game Over.
- Aerith and Bob: A cross-cultural version; Kit and Chi are known only by their Chinese names, while Michelle's is never revealed.
- Arc Villain:
- The unnamed man in a red coat who swipes Chiang's letter at the start of the game serves as one for the prologue, which is spent chasing him down to get it back.
- Billy Soon for the San Francisco story arc, being in charge of the Mooks there and all. However, he still reports to Kwan.
- Bar Brawl: When Kit lands in San Francisco, his first order of business is to find his friend Chi. Unfortunately, Chi owes a ton of money to a nightclub, and Kit has to bail him out the hard way.
- Big Bad: Kwan is the guy pursuing our heroes most of the time. However, Kit's boss Victor turns out to be the mastermind behind the scenes.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: At one point, you can overhear a henchman thinking of picking up Rise to Honor for his son as a gift. Try not to think too hard about the metaphysics of this.
- Button Mashing: Combat in this game boils down to mashing the right analog stick in the enemy's direction.
- Chairman of the Brawl: Almost every chair you come across can be picked up and thrown.
- Combat Pragmatist: Kit, Kit, Kit. In any given environment there's almost always something that he can use to help beat down the bad guys, ranging from sticks to trash cans to railings and walls. Putting an enemy in a headlock lets you do some particularly interesting things, like dunking them face-first into a sink, pressing their face onto a hot stove, or flipping them over a nearby railing. That's not even getting into all the things he can use as melee weapons.
- Concealment Equals Cover: Everything you can hide behind in the gun sections is bulletproof. It gets a bit absurd when a trash can or cubicle wall soaks up hundreds of bullets while you're behind it. However, there are a few pieces of cover that are destructible, but while they're up, hiding behind them provides protection against bullets from the other side.
- Context-Sensitive Button: The block button (R1 by default) is also used for interacting with the environment; this is indicated by a text box appearing at the top of the screen describing the action in a word. Some of these are even used for combat.
- Corridor Cubbyhole Run: Used in the hospital, with Kit trying to reach the end of a hallway with alcoves where he can take cover while it's being sprayed down by a mook with a machine gun.
- A variation pops up in the docks. One section of the level has a darkened upper level and an illuminated lower level; the goal is to try and stay in the upper part, since there's a sniper taking aim at you and he can't see you up there. However, if you go down to the lower level, you'll have to high-tail it between objects that you can take cover behind until you get back up, because the sniper will instantly kill you if you stay in his line of sight for too long.
- Counter-Attack: Being able to counter-punch attacking enemies is a core game mechanic. It's more or less required for some encounters, including the Final Boss.
- Cutscene Boss: Victor isn't fought by the player. The last cutscene of the game shows Victor accosting the heroes at Chiang's grave, only for Kit to defeat him easily in a fistfight and have him arrested.
- Die, Chair, Die!: Destructible objects are all over the place. If they can't be picked up and thrown, chances are that you can grab a mook and smash their face into it instead. Or you can break them yourself, but that's not quite as interesting.
- Dual Boss: The twin henchmen Fei and Hong, who fight in tandem and can even perform combination attacks with each other. You can also make them kick each other in the face by dodging if they both try to attack at once.
- Edible Bludgeon: You get to beat people up with a caramelized roast duck at one point.
- Faux Action Girl: Despite being established as being fairly tough in her own right (enough to beat up Kit back when they were kids), the world pretty much conspires to make Michelle a Damsel in Distress whenever she shows up. The first two mooks she fights are invincible until you reach them, most of the other enemies she fights are out of her league and require you to deal with them, and she spends most of the second Hong Kong section either wounded by a bullet or drugged.
- Foreshadowing: When Victor talks to Kit before he leaves for San Francisco, there's a shot framed almost identically to the scene at the end of the prologue where the red coat guy reports to his boss.
- Grapple Move:
- Done by using the right analog stick while blocking, allowing Kit to grab enemies and drag them around in a headlock. Some more control stick-mashing allows him to either throw them around or smash their faces into walls or objects.
- Some enemies can also grab the player, either by lifting him bodily and throwing him or by grabbing him by the collar and punching him (the latter of which can be countered).
- Guns Akimbo: Whenever a gun section begins, Kit somehow always manages to get his hands on a pair of matching pistols (or nailguns, or Uzis). Borders on Contrived Coincidence for the pistol duel against Won Jang and the church shootout, where exactly one mook with two pistols shows up for the sole purpose of getting taken out in a cutscene so that Kit can take their guns (the former section has no regular enemies in gameplay at all, while the latter only has enemies with either submachine guns or melee weapons).
- Improvised Weapon: Chairs, trash cans, chair legs, wrenches, baseball bats... When you see that "Pick-Up" prompt appear, you know you're about to grab one of these.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook:
- There's a handful of enemies throughout the game that can easily dodge regular attacks, often requiring creative use of grabs and/or counterpunches to actually beat.
- Bulletproof enemies show up in some of the later sections; these are usually dispatched by shooting something explosive that they're standing next to (or happen to be holding) or dropping something on their heads.
- MacGuffin: Boss Chiang's letter, which the bad guys want to get their hands on and Kit has to protect.
- The Millstone: Chi ends up dragging Kit down most of the time due to being a Non-Action Guy, and at one point directly gets them caught. However, he always finds a way to get out of Kit's hair whenever things get messy, and ultimately ends up taking a bullet for Michelle, so he does manage to redeem himself.
- Mook Chivalry: True to the Hong Kong action flicks that the game resembles, you'll often find yourself in fights where a crowd of mooks surround you but only one or two attack at a time. This also makes the exceptions to the rule much more notable, such as the traffic pile-up in San Francisco where Kit gets bum-rushed by up to six low-health goons at a time.
- Obviously Evil: Kwan's first scene has him chewing out Chiang, he's angry most of the time, he wears a black and red coat, and at one point threatens Kit at gunpoint for Chiang's letter. Really, it's not subtle at all that he's a bad guy.
- Puzzle Boss: A number of boss fights have various tricks to make them easier.
- The barkeep can be grabbed and dunked into the fountain where you fight him. However, he can just as easily do the same to you.
- Sung Lung is not good at dealing with the combo attacks you can perform with Michelle.
- The area where you fight Billy Soon has several breakable boxes, two of which will leave wooden sticks that can be used as weapons. He can't counter your armed attacks as well as he can your unarmed ones.
- Kwan can reliably counter your attacks, and if you try to counter that, he'll follow up with another one of his own, seemingly ad infinitum. However, if you keep it up long enough, Kit eventually overpowers him with a flying kick.
- Most enemies that can be considered minibosses often require you to learn their patterns and exploit vulnerabilities in said pattern in order to beat them.
- Railing Kill: Grabbing an enemy and throwing them over a railing is possible in several areas, including the one that serves as a tutorial for grabs where two mooks are blocking a narrow bridge.
- Retirony: The plot of the game kicks off when Boss Chiang decides to retire from organized crime. He immediately gets targeted by an assassination attempt. It ultimately succeeds despite Kit's best efforts, and make no mistake, Kit tried damn hard to protect the old man.
- Something Only They Would Say: When Kit, Chi, and Michelle have to leave each other in their childhood, Kit promises them that they will meet again with the words "Ho hing dai" (Cantonese for "good brothers", or figuratively "best friends"). When he reunites with Michelle, she initially thinks he's one of the goons sent to capture her until he greets her with those same words, which causes her to recognize him immediately.
- Stealth-Based Mission: The game has no less than three stealth sections which take away your usual combat maneuvers and force you to sneak past and/or dispatch a number of enemy guards with flashlights, and being caught is an automatic game over. Fortunately, the guards are (barring a few scenarios) completely blind and deaf to anything that's outside their flashlight beams.
- Switch to English: At first played straight; as soon as Kit arrives in San Francisco everyone speaks in English. Later defied; as soon as Kit and Michelle go to Hong Kong the dialogue switches back to Cantonese. There is, however, an option to have all of the game's dialogue dubbed in English.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Any melee weapon you can use can also be thrown to hit an enemy from across the room.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Even though Michelle beat Kit up on at least one occasion during their childhood, they still considered each other friends.
- Wake-Up Call Boss: The one unnamed but fairly tough henchman at the end of the construction site. He dodges all your attacks and uses a ridiculously long string of attacks that cannot be fully blocked as it'll run out your block meter and hit you. However, if you counter-punch him, he gets stunned for a fairly long time and you're free to wail on him until he recovers. He's basically the game's way of making absolutely sure you know how to counter, which you're going to need later on.
- Wall Jump: Running at certain walls and hitting the Context-Sensitive Button lets Kit weaponize this against nearby mooks. He also gets a more conventional one in a few areas.
