Rainbow Cotton Review

thesixthaxis.com:

I hadn’t heard of the Cotton series at all before this wave of ports, remasters, and surprise sequels kicked off in the last few years. My frame of reference for a lot of shoot-em-up history is through remasters and fan games, so getting an insight into how big Cotton was in the world of cute-em-ups has been really eye-opening. I thought all of the games in this series were varying takes on the same 2D bullet-hell style, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It turns out that a fully 3D entry in the series came out on Dreamcast all the way back in 2000, and at the time it wasn’t received all too well. Now, Rainbow Cotton is accessible and playable on modern hardware, but I’m not entirely sure if that accessibility translates to fun.

Rainbow Cotton, like the other games in this silly series, kicks off with what you could technically call “a story” – but ultimately it’s just an excuse to animate some quirky fairy girls and bring our protagonist Cotton back for another afternoon of spell-casting and candy-collecting. I really love all of the animated scenes in this game in particular, though. Both the anime-style opening cutscene and the pre-level animations of character portraits talking against a backdrop of the stage you’re about to visit are full of charm, and drop some of the cutesy chibi style of prior games for a more detailed, 90s anime OVA feel. It’s just a bummer that these cutscenes weren’t remastered in any meaningful way – they look like blurry YouTube rips and have a noticeable filter on them that sours the experience a bit.

Visuals in the actual game, though, are massively remastered and updated – in fact, they’re practically the only thing this re-release of Rainbow Cotton goes so hard to update. Unlike other games in the franchise, this entry goes for a Panzer Dragoon approach and has you piloting Cotton from behind as she flies through fully-3D stages. It feels massively ambitious for a 2000 Dreamcast game, and the visual upgrades remain faithful