For years, the Cotton series has been a well-known staple in the “cute-em-up” subseries of the overall shoot-em-up genre in video games, especially in Japan. From the beginning, the series showed potential to be a juggernaut with each entry, with the flawed but great foundations found in Fantastic Night Dreams: Cotton, to the extremely impressive Panorama Cotton. That all changed when Rainbow Cotton was rushed into the market. Made because of Success wanting to capitalize on the upcoming Sega Dreamcast, it had the misfortune of being handed off to a team of mostly newbie developers, as well as an extremely tight development cycle that led to developers having to LIVE at Success’ headquarters for weeks on end, among other issues. While not the only reasons it turned out the way it did, it caused it to end up being a horrible yet fascinating mess of a game, with weird controls and unfair difficulty being the main talking points about it. Thus, it led to severe roasting by Cotton fans in Japan and import reviewers alike. And its sales numbers seemed to have reflected that. While there are no sales figures to go off of, the Dreamcast’s tepid performance in Japan, as well as the rarity of finding an actual copy seems to suggest it sold rather poorly. This seemingly caused Success to cease any meaningful in-house development for the console, as they only pumped out a few visual novels and simulation games for the console post-Rainbow Cotton. However more notably, other than a simulation of an actual Cotton-themed pachinko machine made for the PlayStation 2 and a few ports of the original Fantastic Night Dreams: Cotton, Rainbow Cotton made the series go into dormancy for a good 20 or so years…
…at least, until the 2021 surprise release of the aptly-named Cotton Reboot!, a remake of Fantastic Night Dreams: Cotton. Its resounding success, along with the 2022 one-two punch of the other games in the series catching up with modern availability standards and the entirely new entry Cotton Rock’n Roll coming out not too long afterwards, seems to have put the series back on the map where it should be. To resounding applause from many a retro game weeb of my ilk. Notably, Rainbow Cotton was not a part of that porting spree, and many wondered if it was intentionally left out given its reputation.
That was, until late 2023, when ININ suddenly announced that Rainbow Cotton would be getting a remaster across all modern platforms, with the promise of improving on a lot of its shortcomings. It was also revealed Andreas Scholl was the lead dev on the port, who to some might be familiar with as the person who worked on the impressive Burning Rangers Tribute. Since then, he occasionally posted about the port progress, showing interesting things regarding the port and all the improvements added, more promise of the game being turned into a somewhat decent jaunt. Fast forward to now, and it’s out. As a huge Cotton fan (I have a bloody Cotton tattoo for christ’s sake), and having seen crazier comeback stories of failed video games, I decided to give Rainbow Cotton another chance after bouncing off it hard the first few times I tried to play it. Did the hard work they put into the game help turn it into a hidden gem, or was it just putting lipstick on a pig at the end of the day? To my eyes, it’s a bit complicated.
Let’s go over the positives first:
- Runs fine on my PC. No performance issues to speak of and even runs at an uncapped framerate, though its capped at your monitor's refresh rate.
- Price is fair for what is basically a never-been-ported game with new QOL features.
- The controls have definitely been reworked, and indeed the game is way more playable now with the lock on being a big help. Before I can barely get though level 1, but now I was able to get to stage 4 on one credit rather easily on Normal. You can also use the OG controls on the Retro Mode if you’re a freak.
- Hitboxes are also way more fair now, which makes for a way easier time.
- The remastered graphics are great!
- The music is still nice as ever.
- They licensed out the English fan translation of the game, which is good because ININ's prior TLs of Panorama Cotton and Cotton 100% weren't the best compared to the fan translations of those. Its also just nice to see companies utilize fan efforts in an official manner.
However, I still have a lot of not great things to say about it:
- Despite the reworked controls and the new QOL features, it’s still Rainbow Cotton. What was a borderline unplayable mess of a game, is now just kind of a boring slog with a lot of presentation chops. Dragged out levels, along with questionable level and enemy design, really hold it back from being a *great* game in my opinion and this is something a remaster can’t really fix unfortunately.
- On that note, continuing sends you right back at the beginning of the level. It becomes a huge problem later on, especially in the marathon final level. A level select would have been nice, but hey at least there's a cheat code for unlimited continues! Which doesn't help much. I get this clashes with the arcade design of the game in general, but you would think there should have been an option to add some form of a save feature, no?
- Cotton still takes up a lot of the screen, even if the transition to widescreen puts a Band-Aid on the issue somewhat.
- No autofire. There is a slow one with the lock on, but if you wanna go faster you have to mash like it’s 1990. And my carpal tunnel hates that.
- While they did a competent job with the remaster, KRITZELKRATZ 3000 is no Nightdive at the slightest. The menus and some of the newer visual additions feel... weirdly amateurish for a $20 retail product. It’s Rainbow Cotton so I assume much couldn't be done on that front anyways, but you'd expect some more love for it even if it’s the black sheep of the series. More on this below.
- On that note, the "Retro Mode" is just the remaster but in 4:3 and with a dinky CRT filter applied. If they really wanted to bring it in, they would have disabled the new visual features, put the original controls back in, and capped it at 30fps. With options for all of those of course.
- Furthermore, it’s weirdly lacking in terms of options. Other than the controls there's not a whole lot that allows you to change much about the game. No PC-specific graphics options, too.
- The anime FMVs, arguably the best part of the game, look worse than they do in the OG. They have a bad AI filter applied on them, and on top of that, have some horrible compression that makes it look like I'm watching a YouTube video. They did their best with the upscale given its rudimentary digipaint locked at an SD resolution nature, but they certainly could have encoded it better. Where’s Discotek when you need ‘em?
- No translation for the fairy chatter. For something the original dev team put a lot of effort into and has a lot of detail put into it, it's sad we can't even appreciate it properly, besides the option to turn it off completely. They also talk over themselves too, which gets annoying fast but this does happen in the OG game too. So yeah, maybe turn it off?
Overall, despite my laundry list of issues, I think it gets a Recommended, but with some reservation. Realistically I’d give this a 5-6/10, but compared to the original game it may as well be a 9/10. Lmfao
If you’re a huge Cotton freak like me, then go right ahead. There’s quite a lot to like about the game even with its flaws, and who knows, maybe you’ll come out thinking more positively of it unlike me! But otherwise, I say wait for a discount. Even the best remastering effort can’t save questionable game design, and while it is the “definitive” version of the game, I still don’t think it’s the best game in the Cotton series by any stretch of the imagination. Some porting oddities and the lack of customization is annoying as well.
