What did you think of Sonic Boom : Rise of Lyric? I thought it had missed potential, and it could've been better with about another 5 months of polish.

ECK! The game was okay at best in my opinion. Everything else was fine, but it felt like when you put all stats into everything else, and purposefully ignore one other stat. Never goes well.

I honestly don't care much about the game. The story had potential to be great, but ended up being confusing and unfocused. It doesn't help much that the gameplay is very generic and filled with numerous bugs, which ruin the experience.

When I'm such an '06 apologist myself, I feel it's only fair to also give RoL and chance and... honestly, they're not too dissimilar.

RoL suffered because SEGA wanted to port the game to the Wii U, while the game's engine was not at all compatible with the Wii U, causing it to have to be completely rewritten in the little time they had and... flying Knuckles.

And I'll be totally honest, I was one of those people absolutely riffing on Sonic Boom for daring have different character designs. But honestly, can you blame me? They came out of nowhere and were almost implying they were going to completely replace the main Sonic franchise... But looking back in restrospect, I really with Boom stuck around for longer.

As a game, Rise of Lyric is subpar at best. It lacks much needed polish and the gameplay itself gets repetitive fast, just makes going through it a slog. It's not even that it has anything horrendously wrong with it, it's just... nothing special. Or even anything at all.

But the presentation though... OH MAN, THE PRESENTATION IS LOVELY!!!

One problem the Sonic games usually have when made in 3D is that animating the exaggerated the Sonic proportions properly is really difficult and can often make some janky and awkward looking animation, specially in the earlier games, and it only seems like now that Sonic Team finally learned to use 3D models of the Sonic designs to their fullest with games like Sonic Dream Team.

With that said, Sonic Boom gave every character brand new designs that were not only meant to highlight aspects of their characters, but also designed with 3D in mind first and it shows. The animators took these new and expressive models to their fullest and gave us incredibly fluid and emotive animations that serve some break from the monotonous gameplay, it's all so... GOOD!

Both in cutscenes and in-game, I love Amy's hammer attack combo for how much weight is put in it, and all the animations highlight this more lighthearted tone so well, and this amazing character animation continued on for the TV show... which is a damn shame it didn't get another season.

Point being, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric almost puts me to sleep but the amazing art direction gives it the redeeming qualities it needed.

I never got to play the Wii U version but I did enjoy the Sonic Boom on 3DS. I know they are entirely different games.

Never had any other the Boom games but I heard Rise of Lyric was not always supposed to be a Nintendo exclusive but when Sega signed that deal it forced them to make it on the Wii U and since they were using an engine not really optimized for that system it caused problems with the short deadline.

If it had been multiplatform like it originally set out to be it probably would have been polished but that quick change made it too short to fix all the problems.

Was it just the bugs and poor performance that critics didn't like or the fundamental gameplay?

(02-28-2024, 06:05 AM)NeoMetallix Wrote: Never had any other the Boom games but I heard Rise of Lyric was not always supposed to be a Nintendo exclusive but when Sega signed that deal it forced them to make it on the Wii U and since they were using an engine not really optimized for that system it caused problems with the short deadline.

If it had been multiplatform like it originally set out to be it probably would have been polished but that quick change made it too short to fix all the problems.

Was it just the bugs and poor performance that critics didn't like or the fundamental gameplay?

Correct on it not originally being built for Wii U, I said it already in my reply here.

And about the critics...

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B. The game had it's bugs and major performance issues, but on top of that the game itself was as if you somehow simplified down one of those PS2 LEGO games even more even more until all the fun was sucked and you just got the same tediously easy task over, and over, and over again. Kinda loses the charm when you're at hour 8 of button-mashing fights.

(02-28-2024, 12:05 PM)Tominique Wrote: Correct on it not originally being built for Wii U, I said it already in my reply here.

And about the critics...

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B. The game had it's bugs and major performance issues, but on top of that the game itself was as if you somehow simplified down one of those PS2 LEGO games even more even more until all the fun was sucked and you just got the same tediously easy task over, and over, and over again. Kinda loses the charm when you're at hour 8 of button-mashing fights.

You know what, I did read that in your post when you posted it but forgot about it later when I went to reply. Anyway, bad mistake on Sega's end. Hopefully they learned but probably not, it always seems they have harsh deadlines that causes their games to be rushed.