YMMV / Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb

• Awesome Music: One of the best points of the game is Clint Bajakian's soundtrack, which evokes the same feel as John Williams's scores for the films.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The boss fight with the Kraken. There's really no build up towards it at all and it serves absolutely no relevance to the plot.
• Breather Level: The four Hong Kong levels are a piece of cake compared to Istanbul before it.
• Demonic Spiders: The German flamethrower Mooks are really annoying to fight - they're quite tough, keep setting Indy on fire (preventing him from fighting), can't be grappled or disarmed, and will knock you down each time they hit you with their flamethrower muzzle in melee.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The beginning of the Istanbul level is quite a big leap in difficulty compared to Ceylon and Prague. You start with no weapons and have to fight Turkish mercenaries, who are much more capable fighters than anyone you faced before, and many of them on the first level carry submachine guns.
  • The Black Dragon Fortress, where you're suddenly deprived of any special weapons you'd gained up to that point and left only with Indy's whip and pistol. And just when you could have needed them most too, as you're up against armored guards who take more hits to kill, who can inflict devastating unblockable attacks with their long-range spears, and even when disarmed are formidable martial artists. And the tactic to seek refuge on a high ledge and kick them down when they try and climb up after you is hampered by their ability to jump incredible heights with a single bound.
• Goddamned Bats: While the Palace Guards from the previous section would have you reeling in most encounters with them, the undead in the next section do comparatively little damage; at most they do toss you around with their flashy martial arts moves; overall, they end up being much more of a nuisance than an actual threat.
• Nintendo Hard: A bit on the Fake Difficulty side, but to wit: the game combines rather steep Checkpoint Starvation (you have to replay an entire level in case of death) with Bag of Spilling and highly limited ability to heal Indy. On top of that, there is a pretty finnicky control scheme that combines all the downsides of Tank Conrols with a "modern" 8-axis control scheme, with none of their advantages.
• Nightmare Fuel: Qin Shi Huangdi's corpse coming to life after Indy removes the Heart of the Dragon out of his mouth, and speaking in creepy Chinese can create nightmares for a lot of people, especially the close-up zoom-out from the emperor's face (with his eyes rolled all the way back). Also his maniacal Evil Laugh. Oooh...
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Along with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002), made by the same team, Emperor's Tomb is considered one of the shining examples of the sixth generation.
• Porting Disaster: The PlayStation 2 port (as demonstrated here) suffered from inferior textures and lighting, as well as a very choppy framerate. Not to mention longer loading times than the Xbox version.
• Spiritual Successor: For people disappointed by the lack of attention given to the Chinese Civil War and British and Japanese imperialism in Asia, the comic Indiana Jones: Thunder in the Orient features all three.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While Infernal Machine was considered lackluster, Emperor's Tomb is considered one of the better Indiana Jones games out there, along with Fate of Atlantis, despite being an Actionized Sequel.
• That One Level:
  • If you're bad at stealth levels, you won't have fun with most of Peng Lai Lagoon. If you're spotted, you have to deal with flamethrower enemies on top of the regular mooks. It doesn't help that there is no radar that helps to show where the enemies are looking so you can stay out of sight (like Metal Gear Solid has).
  • "Von Beck's Revenge". It's a chase sequence from the tank's point of view with Indy jumping over pits. Eventually, whip swings get added to the mix. This, in and of itself, isn't too bad. However, at about the halfway point, two whip swing pits in a row start appearing, with barely any space between them. They require near-perfect timing for you to both release the whip from the first and to jump out over the second. The tank also has a claw that will occasionally obstruct your vision of where you're supposed to be running, if only mildly. Seeing Von Beck and his tank go hurtling into a bottomless pit at the end is very much worth it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The game's cast of characters includes Wu Han, Indy's friend from the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom who says the two of them had been on many adventures together. Well, he barely appears at all here and the ending hints to him and Indy having more to do with each other in the future.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: China had more than enough conflict going on during the time the game is set to provide an intriguing setting by itself: Communists and Nationalists were engaged in a power struggle, a war with Tibet had just ended with China taking control of part of the area, and Japan was occupying parts of China, including having set up their own puppet state of Manchuko with the former Emperor of China as its head. In the middle of all of this many dissidents sought safety in Hong Kong owing to its unique political status as belonging to Great Britain. Any of this is brought up very little, much of the game takes place outside China, and Nazis are a major antagonist yet again seemingly just because it's Indiana Jones.^note Germany did have close relations with China at the time, so their presence in the country is at least realistic.