Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation: Lyric. Tragic Villain driven to madness by his incurable condition from his experiments with the Crystals? Or sociopathic, Card-Carrying Villain out to destroy the world in a petty fit of revenge?
Aluminium Christmas Trees: Refurbished missiles, which Eggman laments equipping his mech with, are actually a thing that real militaries buy and/or make. They aren't made from missiles that have worn out from overuse, but from missiles that have become obsolete from not being used in decades; put in new, more capable sensors and control systems, if necessary replace batteries that have gone dead from a quarter-century in storage, and you get a refurbished missile.
Base-Breaking Character: Lyric. Some fans see him as a bland Generic Doomsday Villain who's just there to usurp the plot from Eggman like the Deadly Six. Others are more welcoming and see his Knight of Cerebus status as a perfect foil to Eggman's Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Shadow's appearance basically amounts to nothing more than this. He comes out of nowhere with no foreshadowing, is fought in the Ice Age and prehistoric times (weird even for the game's standards) and aside from his cameo in the ending, he's never mentioned again afterwards.
Bile Fascination: When it was released Rise Of Lyric was dubbed one of the worst games in the franchise by fans and critics, some saying more so than Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). You can do the math.
Cargo Ship: Knuckles/The Pause Button has become a common joke pairing within the fandom.
Common Knowledge: It's Common Knowledge that the game is a quick cartoon tie-in. In actuality, the game came first and was retooled to be more like the newest Sonic cartoon.
Critical Backlash: Rise of Lyric has been getting bad reviews all around, but the game does have a few defenders here and there, mostly feeling that while the game could have been better, it's not as bad as people make it out to be.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Perci, one of the NPCs in Rise of Lyric and the main character in charge of the security of Bygone Island (as well as being the only one on the island that's more concerned with the threat that Lyric presents than the others). Not only did artists jump all over her design when it was revealed,◊ but due to an audio bug in Rise of Lyric, it's implied that the developers were probably intending for her to have a bigger role in the game than the one she ends up providing (see They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character below).
Fan Nickname: The new Sonic '06/Sonic '06 2.^Explanation
Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The game originally started out as Sonic Synergy and had tons of interesting ideas early on that were ultimately thrown aside due to Executive Meddling from Sega and attempts to tie it in with the cartoon. Many fans have gone on to vastly prefer the original Sonic Synergy concept over the game it would become later on.
Good Bad Bugs:
- The infinite jump glitch with Knuckles. This same glitch can also be used to give Knuckles momentum on the ground, giving him very fast running speed. This was later removed in the January 2015 patch.
- Sonic can charge his spindash and then jump to go a massive distance in the air, and he and Amy have the ability to gain a lot of height by performing an input after stomping on an enemy.
- Supposedly, there's a glitch in certain areas that can make the graphics better.
- While the patch removes Knuckles' infinite jump glitch, it gives him the same high jumping as Amy and Sonic and allows him to dig in platforms he shouldn't be able to in the penultimate level, allowing for a lot of Sequence Breaking.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Lyric originally being envisioned as an owl◊ makes perfect sense when you realize that the developers are the same ones who worked on Sly Cooper, and the eponymous character's Arch-Enemy is, in fact, an owl.
  - Regarding that, he even eventually is voiced by two voice actors who did work in Sly Cooper as well.
- Lyric is a villain who's a snake with robotic limbs. This description also fits Serpentine in Freedom Planet, an indie game inspired by Sonic that came out the exact same year.
  - As an addendum, Lyric reclaimed control over his robots and hijacked Metal Sonic with a command module equipped to his armor. Eight years later, Serpentine would do the same thing with Syntax's Code Black.
- The TV show has a joke where Tails claims to have serious short-term memory loss, then repeats himself immediately afterwards. That would help explain why he and the other playable characters make repeated observations to ramps and other objects in Rise of Lyric.
Memetic Mutation:
- This cutscene (alongside a glitch) went viral upon the game's release, for all the wrong reasons. The line "I want rocky road ice cream!" in particular was generally considered not funny.
- BOUNCE PAD! This and numerous other lines the characters cannot go even two minutes without saying in the stage areas resulted in the lines becoming a collective meme of how annoying they can get. So much so that people have taken to modding them into other Sonic games for the insanity novelty.
- "There are things inside these things!"
- Expect to read the comment "Guess they're EX-Naughty Dog developers for a reason", the "they're" in question being the developers of Sonic Boom, VERY often. Became Harsher in Hindsight when news came up that the team was screwed over from the very beginning.
Moral Event Horizon: Lyric crosses it when he orders his robots to shoot Sonic after forcing Amy and the others to give up the crystals just because he wanted revenge against Sonic. That is, if using Metal Sonic to raze half of Slowpoke Isle wasn't enough.
Misblamed:
- Judging from the comments on a Did You Know Gaming episode, some people use Rise of Lyric as a reason to hate on Nintendo again. While it was on their console (and the engine Boom was originally built on was not supported by the Wii U), SEGA never really told the development team what sort of console they would be working on; all they had was an "unspecified next-gen console".
- Like it's also stated under Executive Meddling and above, SEGA is the one that made the exclusivity deal with Nintendo promising Rise of Lyric on the Wii U and none of the other consoles. Big Red Button, being the developers, had nothing to do with the decision and they were very surprised when they learned that it would be exclusive to the Wii U as the engine used for the game, Cry Engine III wasn't designed to run with the Wii U and they were hoping it would be a multi platform game.
Narm:
- Metal Sonic walking towards Sonic as a door closes in the beginning looks like he's power-walking.
- Lyric letting out an angry growl every time one of the gang snatches a crystal during the final battle. It doesn't make him any more intimidating and comes off as rather unnecessary.
- The Big Bad's name being "Lyric", of all things. Just about every critical review includes a small gripe about how nonthreatening it sounds.
- "Our unfinished business... Is finished." Says the Big Bad after seemingly killing Sonic... He had over a thousand years to think of a one-liner, by the way.
- The drowning voice clips.
Obvious Beta:
- Rise of Lyric is clearly not as finished as it should be; it's being compared to Sonic '06 in terms of being broken due to a massive amount of glitches (including being able to skip to the third to final level) found on day one.
- Former Big Red Button developers have explained that by the time they were informed that Sonic Boom was a Wii U exclusive they had already completed most of the game using an engine that wasn't compatible with the Wii U.
- According to an interview with Game Grumps, the Quality Assurance team found and reported most, if not all, the bugs present in the game, but their reports were ignored. The Grumps also jokingly asked if they were beta testing the released game during the first episode of their play-through.
Older Than They Think: An almost universal criticism was that the game's world and characters aren't developed much, especially in terms of how Sonic and his friends met, when its an alternate universe meant to attract new players, especially in terms of what happened before the events of the game itself. Thing is, even the past of the main Sonic universe has not been explained very much aside from Shadow's past, there is no official explanation for how Sonic gained his speed or met most of his friends that didn't outright happen in a game there either. In fact, most of that is because Sega doesn't allow it to be told, which could be the case with this universe.
Pandering to the Base: The inclusion of Metal Sonic and Shadow The Hedgehog can be seen as an inclusion made at the last minute in order to attract fans to be interested in the sub-franchise. Evidence to this is Shadow's in-game model, as is very clearly a recolored Sonic model.
The Problem with Licensed Games: Once Let's Players got some early copies, a slew of problems were discovered with Rise of Lyric:
- The textures and effects are very subpar and reminiscent of what you'd find on a PS2 game.
- The new combat-oriented gameplay is monotonous and reminiscent of the nigh-universally derided Werehog.
- A few game-breaking glitches have been found such as falling through the hub world just by jumping to an innocuous spot and respawning outside of a force field that only goes away when the enemies inside are destroyed.
- The in-game cutscenes are rather crude.
- Aspects of the story (incidentally seen as nothing to write home about) like who Shadow is and why he hates Sonic aren't explained well, if at all (despite this supposedly being a brand new branch with more story and characterisation than the main Sonic universe).
- Overall, people called this game "Sonic '14", "Sonic '06 2", and "Sanic Doom" as a result. Not helping things are Sega not releasing review copies until after launch and taking down the initial Let's Plays in what seems like an attempt at damage control. As a game made for the cartoon, all of this qualifies the game for this.
The Scrappy: This game's incarnation of Shadow had received backlash for stripping of most sympathetic qualities and given a flimsy "I hate friendship" attitude. He also has no effect on the story; he just shows up for a random boss fight and is gone for the remainder of the game, aside from a small cameo at the end. It was received so badly the Japanese version rewrote his character completely as being Brainwashed and Crazy.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- The ring cap of 100 is incredibly unorthodox for a Sonic game. The ability to hold 200 rings can only be unlocked by Rise of Lyric with Shattered Crystal, thus costing an extra $40.
- Controlling the riptide. In theory it's a twin-stick shooter, in practice it's a mess. The left analog stick is used to steer and the right analog stick is used to shoot.
- Sonic runs slower than his fat plumber rival in sections that aren't designated speed sections.
  - The speed sections themselves suffer from wonky collision detection, and abysmal framerate.
- Pushing buttons over and over again will get really boring after just a few minutes.
- The combat sections are so monotonous that they make the Werehog look like Bayonetta.
So Bad, It Was Better: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric received a 1 GB patch update that fixes most of the games technical problems, including the infamous Knuckles infinite jump. While some fans appreciated the admirable attempt to improve the game, the removal of Knuckles' jump was considered a bummer, as breaking it was one of the few entertaining things to do in what is considered a low quality game. Rise of Lyric as a game is no longer infamously bad thanks to the patch, but to some fans, the loss of the "infamously bad" took away what made Rise of Lyric memorable, and now consider the game to be just barely mediocre.
So Bad, It's Good: Despite the game's unanimously negative reviews, playthroughs from ScrewAttack, Brutalmoose and Game Grumps have proven that Rise of Lyric can be enjoyable thanks to hilarious glitches, laughably bad graphics, and some cutscenes and dialogue that ends up being funny for all the wrong reasons. Which is why some were less than pleased when the game was patched.
So Okay, It's Average: Those who don't outright despise Rise of Lyric usually see it as this, citing that outside of technical problems, it's a playable but unremarkable adventure-platformer. The 1 GB patch firmly planted the game into this, which may or not be considered a good thing.
Tainted by the Preview: Early impressions for Rise of Lyric were not been good to say the least; due in part to the sub-par graphics and gameplay decisions.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Rise of Lyric. Where do we start? The game was supposed to have more characterization than the mainline games, but it seems whoever wrote the story didn't even attempt to flesh out any of the characters and it shows.
- Lyric. He was played up as this great evil and a darker and graver threat than Eggman. And that part is true as he does usurp the plot from Eggman and has some pretty dark scenes such as when he nearly kills Sonic, but at best he's a Generic Doomsday Villain as he has so little characterization beyond his desire to create a robotic world and his desire for revenge against Sonic. And while we're shown some admittedly interesting bits and pieces of his past, such as his fall into madness and villainy from his experiments with the crystals and his imprisonment by the Ancients, they're never fully expanded on and mostly glossed over to advance the already rushed plot. Shattered Crystal rectifies this somewhat by having a comic prequel that explains how he was imprisoned by the Ancients, but it's not much. All in all, there isn't enough of him shown to be really interested in him.
- On a similar vein, we have Shadow. While he has a bit more of a role in Shattered Crystal thanks to the comic prequel, in Rise of Lyric, he's reduced to a random boss fight and his relation to Sonic is left largely unexplained. Worse still, his personality is vastly different from his mainstream counterpart — while his mainstream counterpart is a prick for sure, he's still heroic in his own right. Here, he's just an arrogant jackass who antagonizes Sonic for no other reason than "just because." This is made all the more jarring as Shadow's design is strikingly similar to his mainstream counterpart, the only difference between them is the additional quills like Sonic. For reference, see mainstream Shadow◊ and Boom Shadow.◊
- Then, there's Metal Sonic. While he has a bit more of a role in Rise of Lyric than Shadow, there is still so much of him that is left unexplained such as his rivalry with Sonic or how he even knows the gang. Worse still, it seems he's been reverted back to the Flat Character his mainstream counterpart started as, basically a robotic lookalike who challenges Sonic because Eggman created him that way. Shattered Crystal ends up making this worse by reducing him to a mere rival race. What makes Metal Sonic's appearance even more jarring is that he is the only returning character whose character design is exactly the same as his regular counterpart, so ironically he no longer resembles the character he was supposed to. Despite the general contentious nature of the sports tape designs, a lot of fans seem to think that not wrapping Metal in duct tape or warning tape was a missed opportunity.
- There's also Sticks the Badger. Like Shadow, she has a larger role in Shattered Crystal and is one of the playable characters. But in Rise of Lyric, she's a cameo who only appears in a sidequest to ask the gang for the crowns they've been collecting. There's no explanation of how she knows the gang or how they actually met and she's basically there just to be there. To make matters worse, her personality in this game is so vastly different from how she's portrayed in Shattered Crystal and the TV show that she's practically unrecognizable. In the TV show, she's portrayed as a paranoid nut who is capable of talking normally despite her feral nature. In here, she's not only far less paranoid, but her speech is more primitive than in the show. Made all the more jarring as she's one of the main characters of the TV show, which the game is supposedly a prequel to.
- Some people feel that Q-N-C and Perci fall into this. For the former, it's because there are lines in the game that imply that he was meant to follow Sonic throughout the adventure (he appears twice in two different levels and both times the characters talk as if he's been with them for the whole game) and either betray him or fully betray Lyric at the climax. For Perci, not only did her design take off well with the fans, but there's an audio bug where Amy says "Good job, Perci!", hinting that she would've been an Action Girl, or at least have had a more active role in the plot.
- Sonic himself in Rise of Lyric is characterized as a loner, though he hardly shows it. One of the ideas that would open doors for Sonic to express it is when he takes Shadow's words at heart about him being weak for relying on his friends and go on his mission alone, thus temporarily falling out with the others. This also doubles with his friends calling him out on getting them locked in the ruins despite that he tried to save them from being harmed by Metal Sonic and an army of robots.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Rise of Lyric's plot is such a pitiful mismanagement, it's not even funny. This is supposed to be a new universe of the Sonic series, a chance to start fresh and offer a new take on things. But it seems whomever wrote the story only put the barest minimum of effort into fleshing out the world and it shows. We're dropped right into the game with no given introduction to the main cast or their conflict with Eggman at the start. There's no clue of Shadow's relation to Sonic (only Shattered Crystal addresses this; his role in Rise of Lyric is nothing more then a cameo). The time travel part is, at best, largely glossed over. Random characters show up just to be there, including Sticks, one of the main characters in this series (except in Shattered Crystal, where she's more important). Ultimately, the story can't seem to decide where to really go with itself. There are some legitimately good ideas here, such as the Ancients, the Chaos Crystals and Lyric's apparent fall into madness from studying them, but we're never really shown them; instead only vague hints are given, then dropped to move on with the adventure, which ultimately robs them of context. In the end, enough isn't explained to really get invested in the plot, let alone care about the characters and their plights.
- Shattered Crystal somewhat rectifies this by having a slightly more coherent plot and a comic prequel to explain some things in the game, but like with Rise of Lyric, it still leaves some things unexplained. It also doesn't help that the game is completely separate from Rise of Lyric^note, which causes a Continuity Snarl that only adds to the confusion.
- Sonic was supposed to be a loner in the games' continuity (especially in Rise of Lyric), but other than a few comments and cutscenes (usually between him and Knuckles) that suggest that he doesn't like working with the others (which can come off as just Sonic being his usual cocky self), he spends most of the games being a great team player. When Shadow appears in Rise, he even taunts Sonic for relying on his friends!
- The opening cutscene begins with an In Medias Res-style no-context scene of Sonic getting blasted by Lyric's robots, falling into a hole, and being buried by rocks, before cutting to a "Yesterday" card and beginning the story, seemingly setting up a How We Got Here plot leading to that event. But when the climactic scene finally occurs, after Sonic is buried and Lyric leaves with his robots, he's immediately dug out by his friends and is completely unharmed, undermining the drama of the scene and causing the In Medias Res intro to only lead to a massive Anti-Climax.
Woolseyism: As mentioned above the Japanese Version of Rise of Lyric changed the dialogue and added a robotic filter to make it clear that Shadow was being mind controlled by Lyric (as he was in Shattered Crystal) and made it clear this wasn't natural behavior https://www.sonicstadium.org/2015/01/2nd-update-shadow-is-actually-an-android-in-sonic-boom-what/

YMMV / Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

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