Scene - TWO DAYS AGO
[ME] Bumbling servant-bot, today is Sonic day. Please go out to Gamestop and pick up a copy of Sonic Origins for me.
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] Sure thing, master! But one small concern -- isn't that game really unpopular? I heard the backlash to it was massive.
[ME] I mean I suppose there's been some disappointment but for the most part I've thought the game was fine.
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] You said Sonic Origins, right? That's the name of it? I thought it went by something different.
[ME] I mean I realize that there are a lot of these sorts of releases out there but to my knowledge it hasn't gone by any other names.
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] Just to make sure I know which game you're referring to master, we're talking playable Amy and Knuckles? Going back to where it all began? Time-travel shenanigans and things like that? Ah, right -- Sonic Boom?
[ME] I mean...yeah, all that sounds right.
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] I just wanted to make sure. I'm surprised, as I thought the game was about a decade old at this point, but you want it now?
[ME] I mean, I guess you could say that, but then again it's also arguably older than that?
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] Sorry, just making sure I'm not getting things mixed-up, amster. And, to be clear, we're talking about the game with the cartoon tie-ins, right? That one?
[ME] Uh, yeah? That's true I suppose, thought I'm not sure why you'd need to ask.
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] Yes, of course, now that you mention it, master, that went almost without saying. I think it's also equally safe to presume I'm looking for copies for Nintendo, right?
[ME] Of course. After all, I want to play it both on my TV and potentially on a handheld.
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] Of course, master. I'll be right on my way to get you a copy!
Scene - TWO HOURS LATER
[BUMBLING SERVANTBOT] Here you are, master!
[ME] ...I knew I should have paid the extra $200 for the non-bumbling model.
End of Scene
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is fascinating to me though I avoided getting it for the very simple reason that it looked absolutely awful to play and took away basically everything from Sonic games that I actually enjoy: fluid movement; shorter, faster levels; score attacking; clever escalation of stakes through sense of place; and the occasional novel bonus mode that recontextualizes level design and engages some level of lateral thinking. Rise of Lyric has almost none of that. It feels at all moments like a completely different game that had a Sonic skin applied to it at the last minute.
That's not to say that it was conceived as some other property, no, but when the startup includes splash screens for cryengine and bink video, you know you're looking at a game with an especially cursed development cycle, and you know it definitely wasn't intended for WiiU.
That the game's design was compromised from its original vision is almost immediately obvious.
This isn't just because the opening sequence runs like crap -- though I initially experimented with playing through Citra, and since the performance seemed a bit questionable wanted to compare with it on original hardware. I can confirm it runs better on Citra. My Xeon 1650v3 and RTX 3060 combo is at this point pretty middle-of-the-road, so WiiU might be a pretty lousy way to experience it.
No, the point at which it becomes obvious that this game was meant to be something different is in its first 2D sequences, where the 4 playable characters all have specific routes to reach to activate lasers pointed at some crystal thing. These sequences look designed to be played simultaneously for all 4 at once, but you do them in groups of 2 each -- and I didn't test how this sequence works in multiplayer, but my guess is "confusingly" at best.
Some basic hunting confirms that, yeah, this was developed for PC and supported a sort of 4-player online multiplayer thing. It would have probably been along the lines of Left 4 Dead, with each stage serving as a small episode in its own right, and with a heavy emphasis on going back in time and exploring a different relationship between Eggman and Sonic (hence the 'Sonic Origins' working title; this conceit was eventually dropped). Ultimately only one mission involves time travel, but with the significance to the storyline it presents you'd have expected there to be more of it. Instead, it merely gestures at a wider world that was not fully explored.
The game had a pretty troubled development cycle, obviously, between the changes in direction and mandated shift to WiiU. The game does not put its best foot forward, and while the performance is never particularly great both the pacing and level structure get better over time. Once you get the map, the game gets significantly more comprehensible, though it's still obviously rough around the edges; it's obviously significantly easier to tell where you need to go to make progress and the core 'gameplay loop' of going to a story mission, getting a crystal, and returning becomes a bit easier to follow and there's less extraneous stuff put in your way (though at least one such extraneous bit, involving the biplane, had development but was cut partway through). The flow of explore hubworld -- find mission area -- complete mission and return to hubworld feels natural and it's weird that it's only the second half of the game where that's consistent rather than being dragged from mission to mission.
There definitely needed to be more fast travel options within the hub worlds, though. The first one has a one-way route with missable collectible items on it. In order to get back to the start of that sequence to reach those items, you have to go to a different level (or the other hub) and then return. Also the hub worlds have very lousy system performance; it's easy to miss items simply because the game is not able to be responsive enough. Cryengine on WiiU, what a fuckin concept.
It's funny, on some level, "open world Sonic game whose plot is about exploring advanced technology from an ancient civilization 1000 years ago and also there's a new guy unleashed with the help of Eggman who's particularly nasty and is totally happy to make the entire world uninhabitable" is almost forward-thinking. I haven't played Sonic Frontiers; I'm not in a massive hurry to do so, mainly because I find the design of the game clashes with the sort of things I play Sonic for. I knew going in that I was not going to like this game, and I didn't, but I did get to understand it a lot better. Though I didn't enjoy it, the game is on some level utterly fascinating because you can see traces throughout it of various game ideas that only half-survived the development process and Sega's oversight. Sometimes (most of the time) I'll take a weird game over a good game.
What Rise of Lyric reminds me more of is not any platform game -- certainly not a platform game from the PS2 era or earlier! No, I'm mostly reminded of a combination of Halo and Borderlands. Auto-run segments in Sonic games were already a thing in Sonic 06, Unleashed, Colors, and Lost World, so they're hardly a novel experience, but here their specific goal in ferrying Sonic between setpieces stands out more here, similar to what the Warthog does in Halo levels in ferrying Master Chief from shooting setpieces. While I had certainly thought early areas looked and maybe felt a little like Halo, the fact that the autorun accelerators are literally called "warthog gates" in concept art makes me think this similar feel was very intentional.
As for Borderlands, I put that down to the game having a similar sense of humor -- lines aren't necessarily funny but they can be pretty weird are delivered like they're jokes. The line I enjoyed the most remains Eggman's line at the start of his fight in the Creeper Gorge level because it's delivered dryly rather than like a punchline.
However, the best lines are the ones our heroes make when they are exhausted by the level design. Variations on "Another laser chamber? The ancients were some real sick fucks". Someone out there understood that the level design can be a bit much if you're actually trying to hunt for all the hidden items, I guess. Imagine if they did this in Sonic Heroes. "A THIRD laser trap over rails? Did Eggman finally figure out how to use copy and paste in his airship design program?" Disclaimer: I may be bad at saying wacky things that seem like jokes but might not be. By the way, the characters themselves say dismissive things about the team's attempts at humor. It's some really incredible stuff that all points to people at least knowing this was not a game that was fundamentally flawed.
The story is kinda weird, because a very small handful of characters, like Fastidious the Beaver (what the hell kind of name is this, how in the hell are you going to name a character an adjective and then their species? have some fucking creativity you weirdos) are Sonic Boom regulars, most are unique to this game. Ultimately the story feels disconnected from the wider continuity because it's both so specific in its direction (Lyric has no appearance in the cartoon, and while Shadow and Metal Sonic do appear here and in the cartoon, they have questionable relevance to the plot) and doesn't tie into it in any way. the 3DS game, Shattered Crystal has a different story that's arguably contradictory to this one but makes more sense in the context of the wider Sonic Boom universe, because it doesn't try to tell as much detail. Again, an indication that the Sonic Boom dressing in Rise of Lyric was added fairly late into the design process at the very least. The 3DS sequel Fire and Ice was conceived from the start as a Sonic Boom game for certain, and doesn't have that narrative clash. You know what they say, two's company, three's a charm.
The Sonic Team game I'm actually most reminded of is Phantasy Star Online. It shares the cooperative multiplayer conceit (even if the story only supports 2, rather than 4, players) and has a soundtrack that's more atmospheric and ambient than melodic but transitions to different arrangements depending on the context. Each area's music is arranged into a variant for exploring (usually sparse instrumentation and a melody line over some basic chord accompaniment), a variant for battles (with fuller bass instruments and percussion), and a variant for autorun areas (which tends to include more staccato arpreggios). Rise of Lyric also tries to mimic PSO's mixing of techno-fortresses with hostile wilderness, but doesn't do it as well; it only comes across in a few levels and not very well at all in the hub worlds.
There's also more than a touch of Bioshock (mainly in terms of environment design, right down to one level looking like Bioshock but with more green goop), and...to be honest, something like the Unreal engine powering that game both delivered striking visuals and actually decent performance for the consoles of that generation. Imagine if they'd actually used Unreal 2. It might have looked about as nice and almost certainly would have run better on WiiU.
Going back to my previous comments on side characters, for the size of the world there really aren't that many, only about a dozen or so. It's jarring and makes the world feel incredibly small despite its openness. The open world areas connecting story missions definitely feel like an afterthought, and it's especially weird that there are only two of them, and the first one has a lot of empty space in it. With the first such area being somewhat unsettled ruins with an archeological exploration and the second one being a large village, you'd expect there to be, in the now-classic 3D Sonic style, a third area encountered late in the game that serves as the villains' base of operations (think like SA1's Mystic Ruins, Station Square, and Egg Carrier; SA2's desert area, San Francisco area, and outer space; hell, even 06 had the forest, new town, and castle though they don't line up so well with those groups). When you work from the presumption that development was just inherently hosed at every step, it really does seem like there was some part of the design here that just never got implemented.
Another thing that never really amounted to as much as the design documents (concept art) seemed to emphasize: apparently Lyric really likes this one design of gargantuan robot that looks sorta like a cross between the iron giant and a dogu doll. They're everywhere in environmental and concept art, and at the start of the game you can just barely make out the head of one in the distance, though it's not very visible. The archeological dig at the first open-world area has a base of operations around one of these robots, and you run around another one in the time-warp level. There are a bunch of them in the final level, which appears to be a construction factory for them. The problem is not a single one of them does anything. They're just...there. At most you stand on them for a couple bits. Massively wasted opportunity, especially as there isn't even a single cutscene where they're shown in motion. So they're just kinda weird statues, in the end.
There's a very "western sonic in the late 90s" vibe to it. Not just in that the quippiness and stuff about mysterious ancients with technological artifacts feels in line with the saturday morning show and the comics, but also because the environments tend to feel both exotic and hostile. That's not what my impression of the games of the time was, that these areas felt more chill and like places you'd want to hang out in, even if they were filled with traps. Sonic Boom feels like Indiana Jones style pulp environment design; Sonic on Genesis struck me as more like Spirited Away or The Cat Returns.
My absolute favorite fun fact about this game is that Chris Senn, former Sega Technical Institute artist and designer, worked on this game. His previous most notable credit was as a major developer on Sonic X-Treme, the Saturn 3D Sonic game that was plagued by development issues, stress, conflicting ideas, and never actually made it to console. So, uh, some absolutely incredible luck following this guy. But what I found shocking was that, ultimately, there really does feel like some connective tissue to old ideas from X-Treme, especially in the visual design of areas. Have you seen Fei Cheng's old concept art for X-Treme? A bunch of these were included in press kits for the game, and stuff like the Jade Gully hut were, as a 7-year-old who didn't understand much about how video games were made but was even crazier about the blue hedgehog than I am now (or at least, a very different but deeply intense kind of crazy) some of that art is baked indelibly in my mind. There are so many parts of the game that look almost identical to one or another piece of that art, where I'm associating each one with specific setpieces in certain levels or hub areas. Being able to see something uncannily similar rendered in real time...for as much as this game hurt to play, this was something that almost made the whole ordeal worth it. (Funnily enough, X-Treme was initially envisioned as a Saturday morning tie-in game, though this didn't last long into the design process. Both games also share a similar horrible fate of having to migrate development targets across multiple platforms, no doubt a key component of their common threads of troubled development.)
Other fun facts: while the game got patched to fix some bugs, there's still a bug where one level will not have its completion marked with a star when you play it on the unlockable harder difficulty. So if you're an anal-retentive nutcase like me seeking to 100% this game for some unspeakably horrible reason, well, keep in mind it won't all get recorded. There's also no reward for picking up the crowns hidden in the stages after you hit 150 (which is the amount needed for the last level of ability upgrades); 100% completion of collectibles offers no extrinsic reward.
God what a fucked game this was.
I just want to be clear that despite the fact that there are at times where I imply this was an important experience, do not take that to mean it was a good one! This game broke me! It broke me so hard that by the end of the story I was on eBay looking for copies of Shattered Crystal to help me detox, and right after doing that I went into my closet to find my 3DS game case and discovered that I have a full copy, box and manual and all, already in my collection that I managed to forget about.