YMMV / Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Menie-Funie states the obvious a lot while interrupting your progression at the start of a level, which gets on some players' nerves.
• Awesome Music: It's by Sonic Team, after all.
  • "Billy's Courage balances ominous backbeats, a harp, and a choir of children into a fitting song for Dark Raven that doesn't forget the game's whimsical nature. It's quite the sendoff.
  • Many of the level melodies incorporate whistling reminiscent of chicken coos, and it works better than you'd expect. "Volcanic Orchestra" complements it with a typical harsh-sounding volcanic level theme, creating something both grand and charming.
  • "Lullaby of Snow Mountain" uses bells and wind instruments to sell Blizzard Castle's cold, mysterious atmosphere.
  • "Pinball-like Echo", its daytime counterpart, uses similar instruments to make you feel like you're rolling through a winter wonderland.
  • The boss theme hams up the funny-looking bosses and makes for a satisfying battle theme.
  • As tradition, Chant This Charm is both the ending theme and a recurring leitmotif. This alone would make it satisfying to hear in the end credits, but it's also adorable and corny. For game like Billy Hatcher, would you have it any other way?
  • The song from the commercial is fondly remembered by many, though it doesn't seem to exist as a stand-alone song.
• Breather Boss: Despite being in one of the hardest worlds in the game, Saltim's one of the easiest bosses of the lot. He can't hit you with his bombs or ambush you from the mirrors as long as you stay on his trail, while his mirror vacuum attack only requires you to run away for a few seconds.
• Breather Level: Circus Park 2 lacks the tricky platforming that characterizes the rest of the world, to say nothing of the closing fight with Saltim.
  • Blizzard Castle 3 tasks you with completing a snowman. It's certainly a charming objective, but with snow everywhere and not much required platforming, it's also a brisk one.
• Cult Classic: Billy Hatcher was released in the middle of Sega's GameCube hot streak, a drought of new Sonic titles, and the last hurrahs of the 3D platformer genre. And given that no other game plays like it, a small cult following was inevitable.
• Fridge Logic: Why do crows, diurnal birds with horrible night vision, want to bring about a world of eternal darkness?
• Genius Bonus: Bantam's chicken suit resembles a red junglefowl, one of the most historically important chicken species.
• Goddamned Bats: Given Billy and the egg's unconventional movement, any of the monsters that push you can be annoying and disorienting. Hope you're away from a ledge!
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Hatching an egg. It first makes a jingle when it's at full size, then you have to charge Billy's crowing move to make it hatch. After he does so, the egg makes a pleasant popping sound...and bonus points if there's a cute little animal inside, which also makes a little noise.
  • The crows make a short call when you defeat them, and it's even better when you run over several crow monsters at a time.
  • The Elder Chicken crowing to summon the sun, which is followed by a jingle that incorporates "Chant This Charm" in a subtle way.
  • Animal helper attacks make a satisfying "thud" as they land and the screen shakes.
  • Billy's line whenever you complete a level: "Good morning!"
• Narm Charm: Some of the egg descriptions get ridiculous, like Cipher having "powers of fire and passion" and calling the shark-like Kaboot an "amphibious martial artist," but the game's already so goofy that it wraps around to being endearing.
• Nightmare Fuel: The final boss fight is a bit spookier than anything else in the game, with a giant, creepy crow chasing Billy and the music's ominous chanting.
• Nintendo Hard: The later missions can become extremely difficult. The platforming sections, especially the parts where you're rolling down a course are frustrating. Especially the missions unlocked after rescuing Billy's friends.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • While rolling around with the egg is fun, jumping with the egg is anything but. Both the egg and Billy need to make it onto a platform, so misses can cost you a lot of time and whatever you wanted from the egg. Not helping matters is that, for higher jumps, Billy rapidly revolves around the egg; at best, you're facing the wrong direction, and at worst, Billy's falling down a pit despite the egg making it just fine.
  • Red rail puzzles expect you to throw the egg on the start of the rail, then catch it at the end before it falls off the stage. The problem? Throwing the egg has basically one of two speeds: so fast that you can't catch it, and so slow that the egg noclips through the rail. You can trivialize red rails by jumping onto them as if they were blue, but given how the puzzles are framed it's bound to frustrate new players.
  • Egg Rings have little in the way of reference point for the direction to throw Billy, making it easy to either overshoot or undershoot. At best, you’ll accidentally toss yourself back to the previous area, but most of the time you’ll end up falling to your demise at light speed. They're at their worst in Circus Park, which naturally have you traverse chains of Egg Rings over instant death, some of them swinging on an axis.
• Sweetness Aversion: With saturated colors, cartoon sound effects and silly instrumentation, Billy Hatcher targets a much younger demographic than Sega's usual fare, which turns a lot of older gamers away.
• Tear Jerker: The ending. Everyone's celebrating the return of light to Morning Land, but then Billy quickly becomes miserable and sighs when he realises that he and his friends must return to their own world, much to the unawareness of the others. However, he returns to his chipper self when he finds himself back to the same place he and his friends were teleported from.
• That One Attack: Dark Raven's energy ball attack is unreasonable to counter properly: you're supposed to hit the B button as soon as you can catch it, but the timing is so strict that you're better off ramming Billy into the attack and mashing the B button, praying you don't take too much damage.
• That One Boss:
  • Moles doesn't seem so bad at first: his sliding tackle is easy to dodge, and he has the least invulnerability periods out of the bosses. Then he starts bouncing around the arena in an ice ball, and every time he hits a wall, even more ice balls appear. If they hit Billy, they stun him for a second while Moles ends his vulnerability phase.
  • Dark Corvo summons clones of the previous bosses. While most of their attacks are simple to avoid, Glur's homing water bubbles and Saltim's rapid-fire bomb attack can be tricky to dodge. Yet his worst attack is when he makes clones of himself: the clue for which Dark Corvo's the real one is easy to miss^note You're supposed to pay attention to the order in which the clones appear (the last one's always him), but it happens so quickly that you'll miss it if you don't point the camera at Dark Corvo, or if you so much as blink, they can swarm Billy and destroy his egg, and their erratic movements make them hard to keep track of anyway. Hope you find Dark Corvo in time too, otherwise it starts all over again. It speaks volumes when Sand Ruins, already one of the harder levels in Billy Hatcher, warns you about him.
• That One Level: Circus Park 1 doesn't clown around, tasking you to hatch a Golden Egg in a grand show of the game's worst mechanics: jumping, Egg Rings, and red rails galore, with difficult enemies and little fruit. Make sure you know the red rails' "quirk" before you go into this level, or you'll pull your hair out over this one.
• Toy Ship: Billy x Rolly is a fan favorite, even if the only hint of this is 2 seconds of the opening cinematic.