I personally hate eggs, for a multitude of reasons. The bland gross taste combined with the lumpiness is just a pure recipe for gag reflex central. Everyone else in my family absolutely loves eggs, except for me. I’m always seen as an odd one out. There are a couple exceptions where I don’t mind eggs, when they’re mixed with other ingredients to create something new entirely (like a cake for instance), or in Japanese restaurants where they mix very tiny pieces of egg in with fried rice so you don’t really notice the taste much at all. Anywhere else, I despise eggs. Always have, likely always will.

On a completely unrelated note, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg sucks.

In all seriousness, I had been interested in trying out this title for a while. Been eyeing it ever since I was informally introduced to the series with the first 2 All Stars Racing games, and of course it being made by Sonic Team themselves was a key factor as well. I haven’t really heard any sort of overwhelming positive or negative feedback so I approached it with an open mind. I really didn’t know what quite to expect, but…man, this game really just goes from like, 100 to 0 in an instant. Actually, not even that, because 100 implies it was really good in the first place, it’s more like…50-45ish to 0.

If anything, the idea behind Billy Hatcher is very unique. It’s a standard 3D platformer with the catch that you need to use a separate object (in this case, an egg) in order to perform a lot of different actions. Without an egg, Billy has almost no mobility outside of a basic jump and ledge grab, and no means to attack either. With an egg, he can dash, dash jump, bounce jump for extra height, roll into enemies to flatten them and even ground pound. You collect fruit throughout the stage to strengthen the egg and make it bigger; when it’s maxed out you can even hatch it revealing an assortment of helpful items depending on the egg, ranging from 1ups, to temporary powerups, to small animal buddies with elemental abilities. To also give some credit, Billy himself with the egg controls pretty good! At least with general moving around, it’s surprisingly precise and I honestly didn’t think it would be.

This is where my gameplay praises end.

Billy Hatcher up until this point is simply mediocre at best. The egg mechanics, while they sound unique, never really amount to anything special. You just end up doing things you would normally do in a 3D platformer, basic jumping and combat, except with an egg this time. Nothing new or interesting is accomplished by this. Now I feel this could’ve been improved by, say, giving the egg even MORE mobility and utility and maybe even giving Billy himself some additional moves to provide different reasons and situations you would use egg-less Billy over egg-carrying Billy, but no. Aside from one or two one off instances of needing to grab onto tiny hooks or ledges, there’s basically no reason to not have an egg at all times. That leads into a multitude of issues with the egg itself; there’s almost no sense of satisfying flow with any of the egg’s actions. Dashing and jumping to enter a roll that’s entirely physics based feels decent enough, but jumping afterward brings you to a COMPLETE dead stop. This is effective when exiting a roll and trying not to fall off a tiny platform, but it KILLS the pacing when you just wanna blaze through a stage as fast as you can. You just end up mashing the dash button over and over again. Jumping feels sluggish, and because Billy spins horizontally around the egg, there’s a very high chance that, when you’re jumping with the egg to make it to a higher area, the egg makes it, but you don’t. Meaning now you either need to find another egg for another attempt at getting back up to that area, or you have to sit there and wait for the egg to respawn to try again. I can’t even begin to tell you how often this happened to me, it’s very frustrating but I was more so…baffled that this issue is even in the game in the first place. Like, they HAD to have known this was a problem during development, right? Right???

Any other action that requires an egg is either hitting switches to open doors (extremely riveting), riding on very tight rails which can be very finnicky to get working right, or jumping through hoops. The hoops in this game function either like jump pads or the dash rings from modern Sonic games, propelling you in a specific direction. The problem is that roughly 50% of Billy Hatcher’s level design consists of jumping onto higher areas (aka the most braindead BASIC platforming fundamentals to ever exist), and then afterwards watching as the myriad of repeated dash rings holds your hand and drags you through the level by themselves; in other words, a huge chunk of Billy Hatcher is absolutely plagued by a combination of boring lackluster level design and a ridiculous amount of automation. There are some areas where you need to guide a physics based rolling Billy through a downhill obstacle course to survive, but they aren’t that spectacular and they’re few and far between. The hatching mechanic I mentioned earlier snaps the pacing in half even further, because you need to come to a dead stop, press the R trigger, watch a cutscene play out (2 cutscenes if it’s an animal friend), and then continue on as normal. You will never have any idea of how the powerups even work until you go to the gallery and view them after beating the stage they’re in. The animal buddies are primarily used in combat and puzzle solving, which I guess leads not so nicely into the other topic.

I said previously that Billy Hatcher’s levels are 50% boring design and automation. Wanna know what the other 50% is? Combat. A LOT of it. The game, for some reason, has a really big fixation on combat. Much like Sonic Heroes, enemies come in many different varieties with different attacks and strategies and even rock health bars. The combat in this game, however, is woefully underdeveloped. You have like, 4 attacks. You can roll into enemies and squish them flat, shoot the egg as a boomerang projectile, ground pound a group of enemies while airborne, and even dunking the egg into them like Lebron James. That’s about it. Collecting fruit throughout the level strengthens your egg; the bigger it gets, the stronger it is. Though even with a small starting egg, nothing really stands a chance against Billy. Combat in turn ends up being insanely repetitive, just the same group of enemies repeated over and over and over again, and you needing to deal with them in the exact same fashion every single time. There are some enemies that have attacks that damage your egg and make them hard to hit, but all that really amounts to is waiting until they finish their stupid animation for them to become more vulnerable, the bee enemies getting the worst of it. Rolling into enemies is by far the quickest way to deal with them, and this was only somewhat satisfying the first 3 times I did this. Afterwards it’s just a chore, and oftentimes the game absolutely LOVES to gate progression in a level until all the enemies are taken care of, some even spawning in waves! I was so tired, so utterly SICK of this game’s overreliance on splattering enemies everywhere for the sake of “content” that I actively tried to avoid enemies whenever possible, which, again, isn’t really that feasible to do when the game gates progression because you didn’t move the left stick into all the bad guys enough!!! Do it some more!!! This game’s ranking system almost entirely is built upon hatching eggs for bonus points (not fun to do) and combat, except to get a good score you basically need to either use the boomerang attack and knock a ton of enemies into each other for a continuous combo, or you need to use the pile driving ground pound and flatten a ton of enemies at once, or both. Again, my main problem is that it’s too simple and not at all satisfying to do (especially with the case of the boomerang attack, it’s so awkward to hit multiple enemies with), which subsequently means that I didn’t care about the ranking system at all. I got like, one S rank, that was enough for me. The “””puzzles””” in this game, if you can even call them that, are nothing remarkable in the slightest. You either hit switches or hatch animal buddies to put out elemental hazards. Did you know that fire melts ice? Or that water puts out fire? Congratulations, you have successfully completed all puzzles in Billy Hatcher. The game also has bosses but to call them underwhelming would be the biggest understatement of the century. You just wait until they attack and expose their weak points, then awkwardly roll an egg around inside their hitbox, rinse and repeat. The camera makes these even worse, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there, one thing at a time please.

Between the repetitive uninspired combat and platforming being both so unbelievably simple and entirely automated, there’s just…nothing Billy Hatcher’s levels have to offer. Nothing. You’ve seen all that the game has to offer within the first couple of worlds and everything else is just a repeat of the same content over and over again. The first mission is to help hatch elder chickens from golden eggs, and the second is to get to the boss to fight it, and it’s like this for every single world. The worlds themselves have their own unique gimmicks that at the very least ATTEMPT to try and alleviate the monotony and spice things up, such as the cannons in Pirates Island, or how the game attempts to somewhat help the automation issue by introducing hoops that are trapeze swings and rotating jump hoops you need to time to get the best angle in Circus Park, but it’s just not enough. Towards the final traditional world, Sand Ruins, I almost somewhat was ready to go easier on the game with how quickly it allowed you to finish it. It was still too long for its own good, but I was willing to cut it some slack…until the game decided to go “nah actually you need more emblems (this game’s equivalent to Power Stars) to get to the final world go back and get some more lol”. The game up to that point was only painfully mediocre, though it was slowly starting to test my patience the more I played, but now? All goodwill had been thrown out the window, like an omelet left in the fridge for far too long. The other missions the game has to offer are some of the most uninspired rehashing of the same exact level design with the most mundane of extra mission tasks. “KILL ALL DA ENEMIES! GET TO THIS POINT IN A SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF TIME! GET DA BLUE COINS!” There are some missions that are more unique, but I didn’t care anymore. This game never seemed to know when to finally stop, and the repetition of the boring level design and gameplay only deepened my disdain for this title. The final world, the Giant Palace, was just a massive hodgepodge of brand new gimmicks that, while they would be welcomed in any other world to try and add some interesting variety and make the egg gameplay at least SLIGHTLY more engaging, feel like a desperate attempt to shovel all the ideas the developers thought of to put in the main game at first, to instead later run out of time and put them in the final stage of the game. The final boss admittedly goes kinda hard in terms of spectacle, you straight up face this giant evil crow coated in darkness and get superpowered enough to catch his energy projectiles and throw them back at him, but at that point it was too little too late. I was just simply done. Exhausted. Drained. Slightly dumbfounded even. I thought it was fairly mediocre at first, but after fully playing it, NEVER would I have expected Billy Hatcher to be THIS horrendous, THIS drawn out, this AGONIZINGLY boring. I couldn’t even get anything out of the story, it’s so barebones and juvenile there’s nothing to it at all. There’s a surplus of extra missions to play, optional hidden gold coins to collect that unlock other SEGA characters such as Sonic to hatch as animal buddies in neat little cameos, and there’s even a full-blown party mode, but I don’t care anymore. Enough was simply enough. I haven’t even mentioned the large amount of other forms of irritation, the camera is genuinely atrocious. It moves so ridiculously slow, it’s inverted on all sides, and as the cherry on top of the cake, it moves constantly and NEVER ONCE focuses on what you want it to focus on. For boss fights especially, it’s a complete crapshoot trying to get the camera to not leave the boss off screen.

Not every aspect is terrible, but at this point it’s like trying to prop up a giant dumpster full of broken glass with a couple of tasty breadsticks. The visuals are colorful, the character models and environments look pretty good, and the soundtrack was really really catchy. Of course, that’s to be expected when you have legends like Tomoya Ohtani and Mariko Nanba on board, a lot of it was laid back, whimsical and fit the theme really well, but there’s a select few tracks that’s full of big band and jazz that wouldn’t be out of place in Sonic Lost World, the boss fight theme being my personal favorite. But again, these alongside the unique concept are all I can possibly salvage out of this abysmal slog. I wouldn’t personally be against another attempt at a new Billy Hatcher title mind you, but there needs to be some MAJOR overhauls for it to work well if you ask me. I’m genuinely stunned at how bad this game ended up being in the end. Chalk that one up to another typical Yuji Naka L I suppose. The Yuji Naka hater mindset never ceases.

Long story short, if you’re thinking about playing this, do yourself a favor and Cock-a-doodle-don’t.

Did that terrible pun make you groan out of disgust? Good. You have now officially had a taste of the Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg experience. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

this game was hard as balls to find and buy, i spent like a decade looking for it. was it worth the wait? i mean kinda? The game is oozing with sonic team charm all over the place, but sometimes the games mechanics will just screw you over, mostly in the fact that billy is kinda useless without an egg, so if theres a situation where your egg gets somewhere you can't go or you have to be seperated from your egg, then that makes you kinda just a sitting duck for a while. Other than that, its a totally servicable platformer with plenty of things to do and a BANGIN OST. I'd say check it out, but I don't think its a must-play or anything. If you are the type of person that would even look at a game featuring a chicken boy rolling eggs around then I think you'll find something to love here.

I really don't know why I decided to go out of my way to download an RVZ file for Dolphin to replay Billy Hatcher a few weeks ago. I think it was a combination of A) testing out a widescreen gecko code to see how it'd work (pretty dang well btw), and B) knowing that it was a platformer that I not only grew up with, but knew was pretty short (yet it took me this long to finally finish it... oops).

That aside though, it was kind of surreal to actually beat this for the first time. I always got close as a kid, but pretty much always stopped right around the third quarter, which is the Circus world. The reason, as anyone who's remotely familiar with this game knows, is evident even far back in the beginning: the wonky and inconsistent physics. Now, I wouldn't say it's like Shadow The Hedgehog level of subpar game feel, but it isn't exactly like Sonic Adventure 2 or even Sonic Heroes where you can be able to get used to it and figure out the more optimized ways to mitigate any potential issues. Instead of using standard platforming movekits, the titular Billy Hatcher controls eggs that can increase in size depending on how much fruit you roll up, as well as be the main thing in order to do the actual platforming bits with and it could've used some more fine-tuning. Sometimes you have the right gauge of momentum in order to bounce along and cross gaps, other times you'll feel like you're rolling around in a spot juuuuuuuuuuust to make absolutely sure you're gonna make that jump that looks a bit too out of the way. Most of the time doing anything with the rails is a crapshoot since eggs either stop right when they're about to go off on it, or just, fall and plummet to their demise, or even rarely exit and roll away from it entirely, until you realize you can just bypass (most) of the trouble by just jumping and then pressing the R button to do a forward push and land on it, thereby letting you and the egg roll along (this move can also be done to bypass the other infamous part of platforming where the ledge is just the right height to either make it entirely, or the egg making it and you falling off btw). The 'downhill' sections either has a consistent speed and control pushback, or ping-pongs between rigidness and looseness. Add on top of a rather janky and accidental-prone camera, and nothing really feels just right in Billy's game, and it gets worse with how little variety there is in the levels.

Levels are broken down by missions. First, you rescue an Elder Chicken from a golden egg. Then, you fight that world's boss. Next, you tackle miscellaneous tasks such as defeating an amount of enemy at a time, collect blue coins in a time limit, finding and rescuing chickens, one or two unique objectives that fit within that world's particular aesthetic and theming, or three different instances of rescuing Billy's friends from getting blown up by a bomb that then become playable for a total of there extra missions of said categories. It starts out decent enough, but by midpoint I felt exhausted having to do the same tasks with the design of each individual world having little to no alterations done to spruce the missions up. It also emphasizes combat way too much than I felt should've been possible - especially since it's so pitifully easy since you just roll up an egg to either near or full capacity, then squash them for big damage, or get an animal buddy and have them basically oneshot anything - but at the very least you can pretty much skip enemy encounters for a good chunk. Even outside of that, the actual platforming is too basic throughout, never really asking much and rarely utilizing the unique property of rolling an object.

Granted, some of the repeated missions can be short or fun enough to at least circumvent the repetitious nature, and like I said, there's some unique ones that do at least spruce it up, like having to roll up a ball of snow in order to make a snowman's head, traveling around and going up to where a windmill is and activating it by bouncing/slamming onto the sills, or lighting up fireworks for someone. And while again, I wish the platforming wasn't incredibly basic, the few times it at least changes it up - especially near the end where you actually do stuff with the egg differently - makes it a little more exciting.

Biggest thing that pushes the game into being just fine is that, again, it's pretty short and generally easy enough to at least sit through the more tedious sections with relative ease. I do think stopping the player and having them collect 25 emblems in order to get to the final world, which basically means fully completing two or three of the previous ones, is rather overkill, but again it's short and easy enough to at least make it a slightly bitter pill to swallow. It also has the right amount of graphical and musical charm to be rather comfy throughout, along with the fact that it isn't really narrative-heavy, which while I am definitely a fan of both approaches, is good for me cause after having to go through two different platforming franchises that lean towards that, having something super simple and put it at the backseat was pretty appreciative.

Overall, Billy Hatcher is one weird fucking game, and I guess that's why it has some level of memorabilia available in the general sphere of not only platformers, but the Sixth Gen as a whole. Not really polished or known enough to have widespread appeal, but also not engaging or bursting ideas to establish a cult following (or at least, a larger one than you'd expect). It just kinda... is.

Pular as plataformas com o ovo é uma bosta, real, mais da metade das vezes você vai soltar o ovo sem motivo e cair fora da plataforma, e algumas missões podem fazer você arrancar alguns fios do cabelo
Fora isso, é um jogo único que foi feito pra chamar a atenção de qualquer criança que olhasse pra ele, com gráficos cartunescos e bem expressivos.
Minha rotina de jogo com ele é abrir ele, fazer 1-2 missões, me estressar com o ovo e desligar, semanas depois, me esquecer porque me estressei, abrir ele, fazer 1-2 missões, me estressar com o ovo e lembrar porque estou nesse ciclo vicioso

With a few changes this game would be like twice as good. The lives system is archaic and shitty, especially with how long some levels can be. The game is split into 7 worlds with like 8 missions each. The first two are required to unlock the next world, and the rest are sort of optional. Or, they seem that way. Then you get to the 6th world and they tell you that you actually need to have beaten 25 missions to unlock the final world. So then you have to go back and do all those. The first two missions of each world are downright obnoxious. By the time I found out I had to basically double the amount of levels I'd finished, I was really annoyed with this game. Then I did a bunch of the "optional" levels and actually had a great time. Going into the final level, my opinion on this game had completely turned around. I was having a blast. Then I played the final level and had to deal with all the boredom therein. The final boss is tedious and slow.

This game's weakest part is the combat, but holy hell does this game want to put you in combat. The platforming is actually pretty fun once you get used to the movement, although it could very clearly do with some improvements. The music (mostly) rules, with few duds in the soundtrack. Final opinion on this game is that it took away 8 hours of my life that could've been lowered to 5 or 6 if it didn't suck so much. There's a lot of potential here, but being made by Sonic Team and in 2003 really makes it hard to love. It'd be cool to see a spiritual successor by someone who sees what this game could be if it were made Not Shit.