Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

released on Sep 23, 2003

Darkness has fallen upon a once-magical land. An evil King who seeks to rule with an everlasting night has captured the creatures that inhabit this realm. Now, a young boy must use the powers of a legendary suit to control special eggs in order to restore light to the land. Gamers will collect magical eggs, use them to solve puzzles and nurture them with items found while exploring the world. Gamers will be able to hatch the eggs and discover magical creatures with a variety of skills, introducing a strategic planning element to the combat and puzzles. Players will explore massive, colourful environments, each with their own missions and secrets, and then defeat the evil boss of each stage. It's up to Billy Hatcher to return light to the land.


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Silly, cool art style, the music and gameplay are strange but kinda cool. I played this as a little kid, then I forgot about it for decade(s), and recently tried it again on Dolphin. Not sure if I see myself ever beating this game at all.

i never managed to finish it bc im sooooo sucks at video game but i eventually want to bc its seriously one of my favorite games. might be the nostalgia talking tho...

This is yet another game I rented as a kid but never ended up beating. With all of the 3D Sonic games I've played over the past year, this is a game I've had in my sights for a while. Being from the same generation as the 3D Sonics I've played, I view Billy Hatcher as very much a sister game to things like Sonic Adventure and such. Just in time for Easter, I played this over two streams (one week apart) and beat it in around eight hours, and then played a bunch more after the stream to get 53 out of 60 emblems (all I could be bothered to get XP) for a total of about 15 or so hours.

Billy Hatcher tells the story of the titular character, Billy, and his friends. They're taken by the god of chickens to Morning Land, which has fallen to the might of the crows who seek to bring eternal night to Morning Land. If that happens, then eternal night will come to all worlds, so Billy is here to save Morning Land and defeat the crows! There's a bit of exposition and such in the levels from the elders of each of the worlds you explore, but really the story is pretty unimportant and is largely just here to set up the action.

What the action is, is simultaneously one of the best mechanically conceived games Sonic Team (Japan or USA) put out that generation, but also easily its hardest. Billy gets the chicken suit in the first level, and you use it to push eggs around to pick up enough fruit to get them big enough to hatch them. The eggs you find are your gameplay lifeblood, as they augment your speed and jumping abilities as well as allow you to attack at all. You can also hatch them to get power up items or little animal companion friends (some of which are even other Sonic Team characters like Sonic or even Nights!) whom you can use for special attacks to fight the many enemies you'll encounter over the seven worlds of the game.

There are seven worlds, and they have a very Mario 64-style to how they're set up. The first mission is saving the elder of that world, and then the second is defeating the boss of the crows in that world, and the other missions in the world are either one of a set of generics ("defeat 100 enemies!") or one unique to that world. The worlds themselves don't change, but your starting location and mission objective to get the courage emblem do. Like I said, very Mario 64.

While you only NEED to beat the first two (of eight) stages in each world, you actually need 25 emblems in order to unlock world seven whose first stage hides the final boss. The game doesn't tell you that, though, and it'll be mean enough to let you FINISH level 6-3 and then just tell you you don't have enough (but not how many you actually need) and then once you have enough you gotta do that WHOLE (quite hard) stage again. It's not unforgivable, but it's a very weirdly bad piece of design considering that Mario 64 turned 9 years old the year this game game out.

The game is overall pretty darn tough, and even though you start the game with six extra lives, you can tear through them really quickly in later worlds because this game LOVES bottomless pits. It also loves pretty merciless checkpoints in its later stages too. Doing the bouncing on the eggs and dashing on the eggs across small platforms also takes a lot of getting used to, and my gosh do the last handful of stages love having you do that. The level design of the game is pretty solid, but as soon as the third world, it's very consistently unforgiving. There're also the rails your egg can ride along, which are awful in that if your egg is small, there's a good chance the egg will just bug out and pass right through the rail.

Controlling the egg itself can also be a pain, as you simply walk up to the egg to start pushing it, and then you walk away to leave the egg. The only issue is that "walking away" and "turning" are quite similar things in a 3D platformer, and there were many times when I didn't or did mean to leave an egg, but the controls conspired to make me to the opposite and I ended up dying. Given that the Z-button literally isn't used at all, a dedicated "interact" button for the eggs would've been really appreciated. Adding up all of that level design meanness, the control issues, and the bugs (which are present enough to be annoying, but not enough to kill the game overall), you will likely get quite a few game overs before you reach the end of the game's story.

As expected for a Sonic Team game, the music and presentation are pretty damn good. The game has a lot of really fun music, and all the character designs are great. Billy's friends and the boss enemies in particular are really well designed, and the boss fights too are (usually) really good fun (my personal favorite being the world 6 boss, with my least favorite being the final boss, as they do that whole "learn a whole new mechanic to beat this boss" nonsense and it makes the whole thing feel awkward and unfair). It feels weird that Billy's friends are restricted to their own special stages (rescuing each of them unlocks a 6th, 7th, and 8th mission in each world respectively) instead of just being generally selectable, given that all of them play identically, but it's not a huge horrible deal in the end.

Verdict: Recommended. Warts and all, I enjoyed my time with this game. It's definitely one of the harder 3D platformers I've played over the years, and certainly in the GameCube generation of consoles, but it's still worth checking out. If you can pick it up for a reasonable amount, or you just enjoy a challenge in your 3D platforming, this is one you will likely find worth your time.

Billy Hatcher is like if Mario 64, Glover, and Super Monkey Ball had a baby.

This is such a chaotic idea for a platformer and I'm shocked we never got more than this game despite Sega treating this like one of their mega franchises back in the day.

Coming from the team behind Sonic nonetheless, comes a platformer which is probably better than a lot of the 3D sonic games.

Billy Hatcher and the giant egg is structed like a 3D Mario game where you're given a couple of worlds with multiple missions where you need to collect a "Star". This time all platforming revolves around spherical oval that we tend to call an egg.

Billy relies entirely on the egg for platforming the same way Glover relies on a ball. When you have an egg, you roll it around kinda like a super monkey ball game, but you do many tricks such as bounce, dash, shoot, pound and throw (amongst other tricks). I'm sure if you spent a lot of time with the controls, movement would be found to be deep as hell.

The gameplay loop is pretty fun. You find an egg and you can roll over fruit or enemies with the egg. The more fruit your squash, the bigger your egg becomes, the more damage your egg does to enemies. If baddies manage to break your egg then you will have to find another one and increase it's size again.

While the game is mostly good platforming fun. There are a lot frustrating moments and the game can be a bit unfair with how punishing it is. Although if you play on an emulator I recommend using an infinite lives cheat so at least you start from a checkpoint rather than starting a level all over again.

I wish Sega someday revisits this franchise, because with some even more refined controls and more intuitive level design, I can see it being a great platformer series.

My opinions on this game and my preference in how I like my eggs share one similarity: they're both scrambled.

When it comes to the plot, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg doesn't offer much of note. Billy and his friends get whisked away to a realm called Morning Land, where the chicken inhabitants are being attacked by a group of evil crows. It's your basic "Go beat up the evil dark lord bad guy" storyline that's all too common in games like this. I'm not complaining about it, though. I think the plot is fine for what it is, and they do try to add some lore here and there to keep the world interesting. I have my complaints about this game, and let me tell you the plot isn't what I take issue with here.

Let's talk about how the game works. Throughout your adventure, you're constantly running into eggs. When you start pushing them around, you gain access to a whole wealth of traversal and combat abilities. You can do a ground pound with the egg and have it launch you in the air to gain some extra height. You can shoot it at enemies and have it roll back to you. You can also use it to dash. What's weird about the dash, though, is that Billy doesn't have the dash move when he isn't pushing an egg around. Why he suddenly loses the will to pick up the pace when he isn't shoving around an egg is beyond me, but we have other pressing matters to discuss.

Throughout my playthrough of this game, one constant thought ran through my head as I engaged with the mechanics: "Wow, this game would be great if the mechanics worked more reliably!"

The ideas they present with the gameplay are neat, but in execution prove to be rather frustrating. Take the ground pound that lets you jump higher I mentioned earlier. You're going to primarily be using this to reach higher platforms. In any other game, this would be as simple as using the move and then getting on the platform. However, things are not so simple in Billy Hatcher! When you use this move, the egg and, by extension, Billy begin to spin. Now, this has no effect on the controls, but it does have an effect on what happens when you land. If you're barely making it onto a platform and Billy is over the edge when you land, he's going to drop and the egg will just be hanging out on the platform you wanted to get on, mocking you as you try to find another egg to try this again. If there's no other eggs around then you need to wait for the egg to despawn and go back to its spawn point so you can try again.

Now, you may think at first that this is just a quirky weird thing that doesn't happen too often. Oh, you ignorant fool! This happens on almost every platform in the entire game. I started forming a habit of doing two ground pound jumps before even attempting to move myself to a platform because I managed to have less arduous results when I did it. I am thankful to say that this has never caused a death during my playthrough, but it is frustrating to deal with.

What did cause deaths during my playthrough was a special object in some stages. Sometimes in stages there will be railways that you need to put your egg on, and while it's rolling away you need to maneuver yourself to a location where you can catch it before it rolls off a ledge. When you first see one of these, it immediately works as advertised. However, in later stages it, for some reason or another, becomes the most finicky thing that you will ever interact with in this game.

Allow me to describe to you how these things almost made me quit the game. So, the first mission of every world requires you to find a gold egg and hatch it. For one world, you need to move this egg across one of these rails and catch it on the other end. The problems I had here weren't with catching the egg. The problems I had were that the egg just refused to get on the rail. If I moved too quickly towards the rail, it wouldn't connect with it and the egg and I would plummet down a pit. If I moved too slowly, the egg would just fall right through the rail, which also causes death since it's an important egg. I also can't use the move that launches the egg out to get it on there because then it makes the egg move too fast, making it impossible for me to catch it, resulting in death. I had to carefully manage my speed when approaching this rail, aiming my movements at just the right angle to get the egg on there. Whoever was in charge of playtesting levels that use these things must've had some level of spite towards the developers of this game because there's no way they didn't notice this! Either that or they reported it and it was, for one reason or another, never fixed by the devs, but we'll never know the true story.

I would probably be less mad about it if death was meaningless, but you have to remember that this is 6th Gen gaming, and we're still doing the lives thing in most platformers, as it was the style at the time. Personally, I think lives counters add nothing to games outside of making things more stressful for the player, and I rarely find their inclusion in games to be something worth celebrating. When developers add a lives system to their games, they either make lives super rare, making playing stages stressful and infuriating when getting a game over, or they shower you in them, raising the question of why they even bothered with including them in the first place. There's also other things to account for, such as what happens when you get a game over in terms of progress lost, when factoring how valuable lives are, but at the end of the day I think every game that has a lives mechanic would go up 2 points if they hadn't even bothered with a lives counter in the first place.

How does this relate to Billy Hatcher, you ask? Well, lives are rare in this game, for one. I didn't find a single extra life during my playthrough. I dunno if I needed to hatch a specific egg to find one but I didn't find any during my adventure. Next, we need to talk about what happens when you get a game over. A normal game would splash a "Game Over" screen with an option to continue or to quit, with continuing taking you back to the start of the stage you were attempting. Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, like other SEGA games during this time period, take you straight back to the title screen, requiring you to go through menus and loading times before you're allowed your next attempt. I think I game over'd around 5 times during that stage I mentioned earlier, so needless to say I was not a happy camper by the time I beat it.

As you go on your journey you'll get "Emblems of Courage", which act as your main collectable for this journey. For most of the game, they don't really matter. You only need to beat the first two missions of each world to advance to the next one. This is consistent for the first five worlds of the game. Once you get to the 6th world, they have you complete a third stage. At the end of that stage, though, you are greeted with a text box telling you that you need to go back to older worlds and collect more emblems before you can beat the game, and then you're kicked out of the level! You could spend over 7 minutes going through the stage, full of deaths and frustrating egg-related platforming all for the game to say "bro look at your wallet ☠️☠️ get back with some more green my man." and throw you out! Thankfully, there's an NPC near that spot where that happens that you need to just have 25 of the things before you can beat the game, but the way the game phrases things when you get to that room makes you think you need to get all of the emblems in the previous worlds, which would've scared me away easily.

At the very least, the other missions that you would need to do to get the remaining emblems at that point are absurdly easy. They went out of their way to make the first two missions of the worlds in the back half of this game worryingly difficult, but the missions outside the first two of each world are a breeze in comparison. There are some that'll end in just a few minutes without any need for a second attempt. It's crazy! Funnily enough it was during the time I was rounding up the extra emblems that I was having the most fun with the game. There weren't many rails to worry about, there was less egg platforming that could lead to ledge issues, it was like I was playing a normal game! All I could think during all this was "Why did they hide all the easy stuff and make me suffer like they have for the past few hours?"

Each world has a boss to fight, as well. For the most part, though, they're really easy. There are some where I wish the camera would lock onto them since they move all over the place and others where it took me a try or two to figure out what they wanted from me, but for the most part they're pretty comfortable to fight. You're not going to have any worries there with this game, for the most part.

Overall, I can't say I hate Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but I can't say I like it either. A neat gimmick and an attractive world are marred by unreliable gimmicks, the trappings of the lives system, and the fact that the game waits as long as it does to tell you to go get more collectables. If this is a game that makes you curious, then I can say it's worth at least giving a shot, but I won't blame you if you want to drop it after a few worlds.

Also, ain't no way I'm going to try to 100% this game. There's no way you get something cool for finding all the emblems. Unless it makes my Wii spit out a $100 bill I ain't doing it, and I recommend you do the same. Just focus on getting enough collectables and move on. Save yourself some headache.

“Sonic Team Try Not to Introduce New Mechanics During the Final Boss with Zero Explanation on How They Work” Challenge: Level IMPOSSIBLE 😱😱😱💥💥🔥🔥🔥

ANYWAYS, kinda lowkey love this game. very charming, very cute, very Glover. wish it’d get a sequel or a remake or whatever to help iron out the bigger issues. i don’t play literally any of the side content and i feel no reason to try to beat any of the levels after the final boss, but i still like it