Composer: Richard Jacques (with additional music by Dave Hewson and Paul Arnold) Label: Sumthing Else Music Works (Digital) Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5) as a standalone album | ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) as a reflection of its game

Listen to "Hub World" on a sunny day. Pretend the game doesn't exist. You’ll have a wonderful time.

To discuss the Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric soundtrack is to engage in one of the most fascinating dissonances in video game history. The game itself is widely (and rightfully) remembered as a catastrophic failure—a buggy, unfinished, 15-frames-per-second disaster that nearly sank the Sonic brand on the Wii U. But sound designer and composer Richard Jacques (of Jet Set Radio , Sonic R , and Headhunter fame) seems to have been working on an entirely different, much better game. The result is a soundtrack that is aggressively, almost defiantly excellent. Jacques does something clever here: he avoids the typical, predictable trappings of a "Sonic" game. There are no cheesy synth-pop vocals or 90s house beats. Instead, Rise of Lyric sounds like a lost DreamWorks animated film scored by a fusion band from 2005.

Final Score (As a game experience): 2/10

Furthermore, the sound design (the SFX, not the music) is terrible in-game—muffled punches, weak jumps, silent enemies. This actively undermines Jacques' score. A great soundtrack cannot survive being mixed behind the sound of a robot dying with a wet fart noise. Should you listen to it? Yes, absolutely. If you separate the music from the game, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is one of Richard Jacques’ most mature and textured works. It’s a soundtrack of heroic loss—music written for a blockbuster that never got made. It deserves to be rediscovered by fans of adventure game scores, guitar-driven instrumentals, and anyone who believes a bad game can still contain great art.