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 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.