This Sonic Team title is interesting, as it is one of the few major new IP's they made post-SEGA becoming third party. I say this is interesting due to the fact that this game released around the time Sonic Heroes came out in JP (with its NA/EU release being early 2004).
Another interesting element to this game is that unlike Heroes which runs on the Renderware Engine, Billy Hatcher runs on a modified Sonic Adventure 2 Battle Engine.
Lastly, similar to NiGHTS and Ristar, this is an action game using Sonic-like elements but having a unique gimmick. In many respects, this is Sonic Adventure 2.5 as despite it not being a proper Sonic title.
Hope you all enjoy some hatching and now lets start cracking some Eggs.....man.
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The story of this game is quite complex and indepth; crows take over a place called Morning Land and one of the chicks runs away into 'Human' world (aka the place Billy and his friends live). They bump into the chick who passed out from being attacked by a crew, which Billy shews away with a stick.
This noble act has the hurt chick, instead of thanking Billy and his friends (who look like they are five-eight years old), warps them to a new world and they are very confused. Nice set up to a game
. To be serious, its a simple set up and the entire game is really light hearted; the characters do not speak and kinda like Banjo, the characters speak in giberish (Billy and his friends do at least). Its a nice set up and a fun way to kick start the rolling adventure.
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The core gameplay here is Mario 64 or Banjo.....but with a twist! You have all the moves you would expect a platforming hero to have; attacking foes, ground pounding, a double jump and a 'run' button increase your movement speed or preform some version of a long jump.
.......But you need one of these to preform that move.
Eggs, giant colorful eggs are the name of the game here. You have 72 different types to use and they can be hatched to get new abilities, but will touch on that in a bit. Billy and his friends can interact with these eggs and preform the mentioned abilities.....but only with an Egg.
When they have no egg, it all they can do is jump and trigger the egg hatch (though there are sections where the game pushes you to do basic platforming without an Egg).
What makes the Eggs interesting as despite the simple concept and how they more or less are a different version of Mario's core moveset, they do a lot to make the gameplay interesting.
You can slam eggs into the ground, you can dash with the things and when you hatch them, it opens the door to different things you can do. For example, you hatch a Blue egg and 'make' a Piplup...I mean Penguin that can preform a water attack with splash damage. This is used to put out fires, with can let you collect hidden goodies or progress through the level.
The animals more or less all have the same action but the way they attack is a bit different (an electric Monkey attacks in a zig-zag, a flying Fire creature charges forward to attack, ect). You can use them up to four times before they run away.
This also leads to the items you can get from hatching eggs, such as Chicken Emblems that give elemental properties to your egg (covering it with fire, wind, ect) or items you can use with the Y button (one to turn you invisible, a butterfly that restores one section of your health, ect).
So, what appears to be a simple game has a lot of deep mechanics hidden inside it and that doesn't cover the extra eggs that you get the more chicken coins you collect; you can unlock NiGHTS, Sonic, Chao, Tails and Knuckles Eggs that when hatched summons those characters to attack for you!
With the gameplay so deep, it shouldn't have issues, right? Well, it has a few that need to be mentioned. Billy and Friends can double jump with the eggs......but they spin around the eggs when doing so. When you land on the platform, it might be a bit small and while the egg lands on it, you don't due to spinning around at the wrong side.
It takes a while to have an egg respawn and this happens frequent enough to become an annoying issue. The camera is also not the best (something Sonic Team just can't get right
). Its better then Adventure 2 thanks to it being movable with the C-Stick but it can get stuck and it leads to boss fights being more trouble then they should be at points. Outside of those two issues, the core gameplay is very solid and that could be due to Sonic Team learning a lot from experience with Sonic Adventure, Burning Rangers and Sonic Adventure 2
. This is a more polished version of what we got before with 3D Sonic (but with different gameplay), so its nice to see Sonic Team grow through this game. - - - - - - -
Game structure and level design heavily is inspired by Mario 64 with a dash of Sonic Adventure sprinkled in; you have five levels for Billy and three levels for his friends in each world (out of seven) and when you complete a mission, you get an Emblem of Courage (ironic considering everyone is in a chicken suit XD).
The levels themselves are mixed. Some of them are quite open, letting you explore, play around with the different egg abilities and fight some foes in between everything. Every single world has the two same opening levels; find a golden egg and hatch it & do X amount of thing or destroy X amount of things before unlocking the boss gate.
The game mixes things up with different tasks for each world and level gimmicks help make things different. For example, the water level has various slides you can roll down and you have to go down them & go up them via hopped launchers. Another example is the fire level where lava is instant death and you have to use a specific animal to destroy fossil heads.
Levels aren't just this though as some get quite creative; the Ice World has a level where you use the game's egg rolling mechanics to build snowmen for chicks and it removes the ability to double jump. You also have snow on the ground that doesn't regenerate, so you have to be careful how many times you mess up (as the snowball can break when hitting spikes).
You also have races, coin collecting challenges, kill X amount of foes and other such missions. But the game is quite fun and due to that, those missions aren't annoying at all (though the kill X amount of foes ones could get annoying).
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The presentation is classic SEGA/Sonic Team and you can really see the 'Sonic' elements across the entire game. The way the world looks, the character designs and the animations for each character; it screams 'Sonic'. But its different in tone, its a lot more light hearted and thus the world has a 'childlike' look to everything. The only time where the mood is 'off' is the first stage in every world and I will talk about this more when I get to the music.
Billy and his friends have nice designs and they look different enough to stand out amongst each other. They aren't iconic like Sonic or NiGHTS but they still look great
. 
The music is awesome in this game, like all Sonic Team titles
. Theme Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSgFJKtVCi0&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl
Forest Night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytX7PbFRPH0&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=3
Forest Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ95UGWRfYQ&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=4
Take Upper Fruit!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6p2h5gz1G8&index=5&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl
Volcanic Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Dk9-oOdpA&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=11
Lullaby of Snow Mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIA72PtAVgA&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=13
Sound of Fanfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLcxeUhu0Ws&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=14
Odd March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbkbxqF8Vw4&index=16&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl
Pop A Parade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl5Ysf_1-Bo&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=17
A-Jack-in-the-Box!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSSUjYyiols&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl&index=18
Legendary Egg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WBzQHFcb2I&index=22&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl
Billy's Courage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XpenOH32e0&index=24&list=PLvNp0Boas721WRc1QdsYvQFTTPOsKDgvl
The soundtrack has more moody themes then I remembered it having when I played this in the past (got this with Adventure DX in 2004 XD). A lot of the Night tracks make me think of the Night levels from Sonic Unleashed, and those were some of favorite tracks in Sonic Unleashed.
This entire soundtrack rocks and some of it got remixed in Racing Transformed! Here is the link
. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN5ZfxK46gA- - - - - - - - - -
One last thing before I cover my final thoughts on the game; you have MP modes and GBA games you could unlock as you play. The MP modes are battles or hatch X amount of eggs and.......its meh :l.
But the GBA games are great! You need a link cable to access them but after you find unique eggs and are able to hatch them, you unlock special mini games for your GBA. Pyuo Pop and a Billy Hatcher game are the ones I remember unlocking in the past but I'm sure there are more!
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Overall, I had a great time revisiting this Sonic Team gem
. It has issues and its not perfect, but its a nice effort to be different from Sonic. I said this with my NiGHTS thread too but here that stands out more as Billy Hatcher takes more notes from Mario then Sonic. But with a unique look, fun gameplay and really clever mechanics, it is quite the clever egg
. Highly recommend you give this a shot if you have a GameCube . There is a PC version but not sure if its easy to find or now. Edit: A kind NeoGaf Member named Persona7 shared a link to the PC version! It should run on most modern PC's with little issue if you don't have a GameCube
. Hope you enjoy this thread and crack some eggs
.
