For those who may not have seen it, last
week we covered the infamous Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric on Wii U, from 2014. That video
covered a lot of ground in regards to what made that game such a spectacular failure, so I
say that you should definitely go watch that to get fully caught up, but to cover the major
highlights: the game was unstable upon release, a product of it being made with the CryEngine that
wasn’t fully compatible with the Wii U console, the game was a boring and bland kids game that
offered little appeal to Sonic fans and kids as well with numerous better options out there and
showed a remarkable amount of negligence on SEGA’s part, letting another disaster game hit store
shelves just eight years after their last one. An attempt to turn a lot of profit that blew up
in their face because Rise of Lyric sold terribly, tainting their entire Sonic Boom reboot right
out of the gate. Rise of Lyric killed pretty much all the goodwill the brand had bought itself
with Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations back in 2010 and 2011 respectively, as with the release
of Rise of Lyric, we were shown that they were not committed to only releasing quality products,
we’d still get games like this. Seriously though, if you read what people were saying about Rise
of Lyric when it came out, you’d think Colors and Generations never happened and that 06 was the
previous game or something. Putting the series in a really bad spot. But Rise of Lyric was not the
only Sonic Boom game as on the same day we got that game, Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal launched
for the Nintendo 3DS and…it also came out to poor reception. Not the scathing reviews that Rise of
Lyric got, but Shattered Crystal skewed negative because of it’s bloated runtime and overall…meh
gameplay. It didn’t really matter that the game was more finished than Rise of Lyric because the
game not being good in the eyes of the public only further damaged the Sonic Boom brand. But as I
said last time, I never played this when it came out. Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal was a game
that, prior to now, I had never played at all. Rise of Lyric caught my attention because of it’s
Jak and Daxter-esque art design, so I gave that game a shot and of course, hated it and traded
it in. But Shattered Crystal was a game that my 14 year old self was already not interested in
because I had decided the developers of it were my arch enemy because they released Sly Cooper
Thieves in Time the previous year…very mature and rational stuff, indeed. But when word got out that
the game was pretty mediocre, I can’t say I felt like I was missing out. I can talk more about this
in a video I am going to do in a few months, but I will just say now, Sanzaru comes across, to me,
as a team of hardworking and fun loving people, that’s the vibe I get from the various interviews
from them I had consumed in the pre release of Sly 4 and for this game. So I’ve got nothing against
them, however…upon actually playing Shattered Crystal…yeah…I really didn’t like the game.
I can actually sum this up pretty quickly. Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal is a game so boring
that I felt my soul gradually leaving my body. I keep referring to games as soul devouringly
boring, and then I review another game that deserves that title even more, it’s happened a
ton of times recently. This game is really long, and yet there is not that much in terms of total
content here. The basic idea of the game is that you run through these stages as Sonic and you
gradually unlock more characters throughout the first hour. Starting with Tails, then the newcomer
for Sonic Boom, Sticks The Badger and finally, Knuckles. With all four of them unlocked, you
must use their abilities combined to collect crystal fragments and blue prints while trying to
reach the end of the stage. Sonic has this dash attack that goes through blue walls, Tails
being able to fly over vents on the ground, Sticks using her boomerang to hit switches and
Knuckles burrowing underground to reach hidden areas. Each character can be swapped out with a
press of the D Pad, as the shoulder buttons swap what menu is on the bottom screen, from the map to
the collectibles tally. In concept, not terrible, but in execution, it’s just not fun. For starters,
the game handles kind of poorly. The controls are simple, A using your enerbeam on these grapple
points, B is your jump and homing attack, Y is the sprint button and X is your special move.
However, the controls of Sonic and friends feels really slippery as you will let go of the sprint
button and still fall into pits or spikes, and the enerbeam never felt very responsive, leaving
you open to falling into pits some more. So, actually playing as the characters is not fun in
this, but then the levels are just loaded up with automation, several seconds per stage just devoted
to watching the characters fly through dash pads, moving through corkscrews and loops, with
none of the interactivity these elements had in all other Sonic games, and that
includes the ones that loaded up on dash pads already like Sonic 4. It’s just a flop
in this game because as I said, you entirely surrender control throughout these segments,
you don’t even have to press the sprint button, the dash pads completely automate the experience.
The game has like 5 worlds or so, but not that many levels. This is because the level length is
extremely bloated. I spent over 10 minutes on the first stage. Regularly when getting into a new
main stage, I’d be there for 8 minutes or more. We all know that Handheld games are best enjoyed
in short bursts, if you are on the bus or in the backseat as a kid or whatever. So I don’t know why
the levels in this game balloon in length so much, the same goes for Sonic Lost World on 3DS which
I reviewed last month. It’s just not fun to be playing a stage and to have it keep going and
going and going when half of that is the same four puzzles you’ve been solving all game long,
and the other half of that is dash pads.
But of course, the most infamous aspect of
Shattered Crystal is it’s exploration gimmick. One of the lead designers of this game had said
that Metroid was a big inspiration for him, which influenced how their previous game,
Sly 4 went about it’s optional collectibles, that was pretty cool, but this game wears it’s
Metroid influence on it’s sleeve much more, in ways that I don’t believe benefit the Sonic
experience. What I mean by Metroid influence is that they have designed the game so that
collecting things in the levels is one of the most important aspects of the campaign, they
achieve this by locking progression behind a certain number of collectibles. For example, in
a stage, you get a token for beating the level, but then another token for finding every crystal
and then another one for every blueprint. To keep playing more stages, you are going to have
to scour levels for all these collectibles, which in practice, is more tedious than it sounds.
For starters, throughout the early game, you don’t have all four characters. So by the time you
unlock them all, you are going to have to go back and replay earlier levels to explore them fully
as characters you didn’t have before in order to keep making progress. It’s not like Metroid
where you unlock new moves you need to progress, it’s just arbitrarily replaying content in order
to unlock more of it in a pretty blatant attempt to extend playtime. It gets really bad because
you can’t just collect what you missed and leave, quitting the stage will tell you that all progress
will be lost, so you have to play the entire, long level, again. Say you missed one again,
that’s another run of the stage you’ve got to do. I played this factory level several times over and
still didn’t find everything I was looking for. And in these levels, I don’t want to explore since
levels have segmented chunks, automated dash pad segments and points of no return, so it’s really
hard to enjoy the stages for what they could offer since you always feel like you are missing
something. To improve the situation dramatically, you can unlock an upgrade to your map that shows
you the locations of blueprints and crystals, and unsurprisingly, this makes the game much less
frustrating to play and I never missed one from then on. But before then, it was hell as I kept
retreading the same ground, never knowing if I was going the right way or retreading the same
ground as rings and enemies respawn and puzzles will lead to shields or rings or other worthless
things. Even with a map though, I still don’t want to play these levels because…they are boring
for the reasons I said just a moment ago.
I feel like making this game more fun would
involve some simple changes. They don’t even have to make more levels, I’d just say…divide
the levels they have into smaller chunks and make those acts of a zone. This would give the game a
better pace, I’d also say the collecting elements should have been entirely optional because then
yes, the game would be shorter for most players, but that might give the players the desire to
come back and replay it, instead of feeling like the game was a lengthy slog. And do more
of these rival races which were like mini Sonic Rivals levels, but a lot more interesting.
If they did that, I’d hold this game in much higher esteem than I currently do. That
wouldn’t fix my issues with the levels, but it would be a start. As it stands, this is a
game I will probably never play again…because it’s boring. As I said, I could sum up this game fast
and so I have. The most interesting part about this game…is how terrible the writing is.
The plot of Shattered Crystal is that Amy gets captured by Lyric and he’s going to zap
her brains to learn of some artifact location and so Sonic and crew set out to rescue her.
Running into Shadow and Metal Sonic on the way there. That’s it for the story, but the writing is
truly diabolical. I am talking…several scenes of characters standing around making jokes about
how Knuckles should be named “Smashles” since that’s what he does…or Sticks and her tin foil
hat alien conspiracies, or…literally making jokes about their plane crashing…while they are crashing
for 90 seconds straight. Or my favorite example, they rescue Amy before the final boss and Sonic’s
first remark is “So…should we go after him or go get some lunch”...what the heck is going on
here? Even some of the critics noted that the writing in this was putrid, so it’s not me
being some uber invested fanboy by saying that. It was just the lowest bar, kiddie humor, like
Lyric saying you can’t kick his butt because Snake’s don’t have butts. Nice, very clever.
What makes the writing so interesting to me as a topic, is how I always see this game, or really,
the whole Boom Era as a turning point in the eyes of many fans. I already said Rise of Lyric made
me think Sonic wasn’t for me anymore, but to compound upon that, I will bring up a series on
YouTube I have been talking about for ages in this retrospective: Sonic Dissected. The guy who
runs it, Roger, also does funny parody animations of Sonic, and I have brought up some funny ones
that parodied the dumbest Sonic plots like Sonic Rush or Sonic Rivals in those videos. But his
animation on Shattered Crystal was always one of my favorites. It ruthlessly mocked the games
writing style, to the point where, when actually playing the game for the first time, I was shocked
at how everything he made fun of…like doing stand up in front of an ancient temple, or joking
around about nothing while a plane is crashing are barely even parody, it’s just what happens in
the game and that context makes it even funnier. The ending of this parody animation always stuck
out to me. At this point, I was pretty well programmed by all the YouTube videos I watched
to believe that the best Sonic games were 1, 2, CD, 3K, Colors and Generations, and that the
writing of Colors had saved the series with it’s humor based approach. But then, after making fun
of this awful story, Roger cuts to Black Knight and we see the characters fighting monsters and
riding lava waves. It stood out so much because Sonic Dissected used to criticize the stories
of Unleashed and Black Knight for valid reasons, like “Sonic just shows up in Black Knight
and schools everyone on how to be a Knight in like 2 days time”, but then, you just look
back at those after four years of this kinda stuff and think…man…Sonic was cool before.
And I don’t just mean the console games, before that gets brought up. Was pretty cool back
in Sonic Advance 3 when Gemerl turned on Eggman and then you got a Super Sonic and Eggman team up
in the final boss as you defeated Gemerl and see in the ending that Tails made him nice, like Emerl
from Sonic Battle, the previous game. It was good continuity and a cool moment. The Sonic Rush games
have cool moments as well. Heck, I’d even say Shadow’s ending in Rivals 2 was a neat moment as
we see Metal Sonic still has some free will left, post Sonic Heroes. The handheld games used to be
extensions of what the console games were doing, which I guess is what Shattered Crystal was,
just…for the new age direction of Sonic. My point is, a backlash against the 2010s Sonic was
growing and a second look at the 2000s games was also on the rise. These things did not come out of
nowhere. I have made it clear that Sonic Era wars is something I no longer want anything to do with,
but I bring it up because I want to establish context on how all these things happened, as we
get back to Forces, the game that inspired my making that Sonic stories video in 2018. But
that pretty much covers Shattered Crystal, it was a mediocre game made worse with it’s
blatant padding. One that only served to make the Boom Series look even worse as it had not just
one dud, but two at the same time right as the show began. But…this began…The Boom Drought.
The year is 2015. Sonic discussion was pretty lively back in 2013 and 2014 as people were hyped
to talk about the new games, especially with Boom on the way in 2014. But following Boom, Sonic
discussion online became a wasteland. Rise of Lyric and Shattered Crystal were both…much worse
than anyone could’ve expected, and the Boom show was already on a path of decline with it’s early
airing times. The media circus that was Rise of Lyric made, I’d say, pretty much everyone sick of
Sonic Boom before the year was even over. But…SEGA couldn’t just move on immediately, they put a lot
of money into the Boom Brand, which really failed, as I said last week. In 2015, all we got was
Sonic Runners, a currently defunct mobile game and Sonic appeared in LEGO Dimensions…real A game
content there. It just felt like the series had grind to an absolute halt back in 2015. But then,
we got word on a new game…and it was…Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice…hurray…another Sonic Boom game?
A sequel to Shattered Crystal no less. I felt nothing at the announcement of this game because…I
checked out of Sonic, I didn’t care one bit about them continuing to do another game. My mindset
was, here’s hoping when Sonic Team eventually does a game, it will be good. Boom is pretty much
dead to me. But we ended up dragging things out a bit longer as Fire and Ice got delayed to 2016 to
a collective…shrugged shoulders. I mean, if people were sick of Boom by 2015, that was worse in 2016
because now it’s a world where Mania and Forces were announced for 2017, who cares anymore about
Boom? So yeah, this game was the best received Boom title…but who cares? I actually did back
this one up back in 2017 before Mania came out thinking…maybe it was good? And I quickly dropped
it because I thought it was quite boring.
Playing it now, six years later…that’s
exactly how I felt, all over again. Only now, I played the whole thing. Sonic Boom:
Fire and Ice is like white noise: the video game. To it’s credit, it fixes all my
major issues with Shattered Crystal. For example, I thought the character handling was much tighter,
so I felt in control a lot more than I did in the first one. Each world has more levels with none of
them ever running past the 5 minute mark, stages typically being done in about 2 minutes, much more
reasonable for a 2D Sonic game. And best of all, the collection element is entirely optional, as it
should be. If you want to blast your way through Fire and Ice, you can. If you want to play every
stage and get the most out of the maps, you also can. Showing Sanzaru was willing to take audience
feedback and improve on their foundations, which is commendable. The problem is that while Fire and
Ice does fix all the things that made Shattered Crystal so…not good, it doesn’t add anything to
make the game…more fun. The major issue with Fire and Ice is that the levels are still just tracks
of automation, in fact, I’d say it’s worse in the sequel since without that exploration element
being required, most players will see this game go in one ear and out the other as it plays itself
more than half the time. Also introducing this Fire and Ice gimmick that never really elevates
beyond the most basic of applications. Fire melts ice, ice turns water into…ice. Sometimes you will
need to do this to get through some collapsing ceilings or whatever, but for the most part the
usage of this gimmick really just feels mundane. Not worth the goofy hype it got in the trailer.
WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU MIX FIRE AND ICE!?!?!?!? Water. Mystery resolved. Even though Fire and Ice
is much shorter than the first game and is doing things to improve the pacing considerably,
the fact that the approach to level design hasn’t changed that much means that the game is
still pretty damn boring at the end of the day.
I knew I had to get this script done shortly after
playing the game because I really feel like this is the kind of thing you’d play and forget almost
all of before the week is over. I just felt like, when I wasn’t watching the game play itself, I
was doing almost nothing besides running forward. Levels not really doing much of anything in terms
of variety, I barely ever switched characters besides them being required because with five
characters, the D Pad isn’t used for that anymore, so you’d have to touch the screen, and on
my…shall we say…setup, I didn’t feel like reaching my mouse to do that repeatedly in a
stage, so I just stuck to one character for a long time and the game didn’t really stop me from
doing that. Past the part where Tails is unlocked, I don’t think I ever used Amy one time, and she’s
the new playable character you are supposed to be hyped about. But her abilities are never needed,
the returning characters functioning pretty much the same as before, only with minor enhancements
like Sonic not stopping dead in the air while doing his air dash. But otherwise, it’s the same
basic puzzles from before, just done…again.
By looking at how it was made, I don’t think Fire
and Ice is some abomination, it’s just…offering very little in terms of gameplay. I think
they tried their best, I mean the art design is neat…giving us levels based on pirates and a
haunted house, the fact that the game has full voice acting in it’s in game cutscenes, and new
CG, show quality cutscenes demonstrates that the team was putting their best foot forward on 3DS,
something I think the other ones I have covered never really tried to do, but when the mechanics
are this…empty feeling, it’s hard to give them game more points than that. Although, I did
notice one thing about these games and it’s that, I am pretty Rise of Lyric is just…not even canon
to the show timeline. Fire and Ice is the sequel to Shattered Crystal, Fire and Ice being confirmed
canon to the show as the main villain of the game, D-fekt goes on to appear in the series following
the events of the game. Rise of Lyric was supposed to be the prequel to the cartoon, but Rise
of Lyric and Shattered Crystal can’t both be canon since Lyric has an entirely different
motivation in both games and…both games showing how the heroes met Lyric. Seriously, Lyric has
never met Sonic and friends in Shattered Crystal, but them meeting is how he was freed in Rise of
Lyric so…it just doesn’t make sense. Shattered Crystal also got a prequel comic in the Sonic
Boom Archie Books, so I feel like, in a way, Rise of Lyric was just disowned from the Sonic
Boom brand before it was even released. Although, generally speaking, I feel like it’s weird to
see the Boom cast, in all three of these games, being involved with some serious adventure since
the show is just nothing like that as we see their misadventures at home. Even with Shattered
Crystal’s awful…Amy gets captured because she decided to joke about how dumb Lyric is with
Sonic on the phone mid fight writing, it’s still some epic quest that you’d never see on the
actual series. But at this point, I am just rambling on about the continuity and presentation
of the long dead 2010s Sonic cartoon series.
And that’s pretty much it for the video.
I mean, Fire and Ice just isn’t worth any more time in 2022 than what I’ve given it.
It’s really not bad, it’s just very dull, very in one ear out the other, whatever
expression you want to use to describe it, it just doesn’t have any staying power, and like I
said when introducing it, most people at the time were ready to move on from Boom and just get to
the games announced at the 25th anniversary party, Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, have something
new and interesting to play and talk about. With Fire and Ice releasing by the time Boom was
really a husk, it just didn’t grab the interest of a lot of people. It was too little too late
by this point, the Boom brand was blown day 1, so two years later, an…”okay, I guess” sequel
wasn’t going to do anything. And that’s that. At this point, Older Sonic fans had Sonic Mania
to look forward to, and this Sonic Forces, or at the time, Project Sonic 2017 looked like it
was going back to that energy the younger…older Sonic fans were looking to see again. And
the next two videos will detail how that went and what I thought of them both. So I hope
people are excited about that. In the meantime, I will say what I always do, thanks everyone
for watching and I will see you next time.
