Despite educating myself on most strange and obscure Japanese series (Tonde Burin is an unreleased gem), I was woefully unfamiliar with the Cotton franchise of shoot-em-ups. Though the series has been visited several times on this very site, this was my chance to finally dip my toe into the wild world of witch based blasting. Rainbow Cotton, the next re-release in the franchise, has so much potential in terms of promise and concept. Hailing from the Dreamcast and being blessed with 3D polygon goodness, I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into this on-rails, wildly colorful and potentially wonderful bit of gaming history.

Rainbow Cotton is a silly premise, as one might imagine from a game full of witches, fairies and candy. Cotton, our titular hero, wants to go get some candy, but  it has tragically been stolen by the evil Tweed, who I guess wants to punish everyone. Cotton’s companion, the fairy Silk, decides that the only way to get Cotton to fight back against the evil is to trick Cotton into visiting the surrounding townships and beat the various baddies therein before eventually going to Lasha Castle and finishing the job. Why is the distracted, airheaded protagonist the most common choice for these games? Who knows or cares, it’s time to blast stuff and get candy!

While Cotton games are best known for being 2D sidescrollers, this is hardly the first time the series has gone in a different direction. Leaning heavily into 3D, Rainbow Cotton has players automatically moving along while allowing you to position Cotton to any point on the screen. You must move around inanimate objects and, at times, choose a path to go down to open up another on-rails area. Monsters will pop up at preset spots and it’s your job to blast them away, either with your regular magic bursts or the specialty use magic that comes from gems dropped by a certain pot-shaped enemy. Pick up point bonuses, keep blasting away for survival and face off against end-of-stage bosses before confronting larger, candy-fueled guardians of each area.

Players should know that this edition of Rainbow Cotton is not a remaster or a remake, but a port from the original 2000 title. The single and co-op modes are intact, the anime cutscenes look a bit crisper, and the only other addition is a frankly absurd “retro mode.” This takes the game and puts it onto a smaller, slightly convex screen like you’re playing it on a CRT television, complete with tinting and scan lines. It also removes the health bar from mid and end bosses, so you just sort of have to guess how far along you are in terms of winning the battle. If you have nostalgia for this title, I suppose it’s a fun way to approach the game. 

Visually, Rainbow Cotton is a smorgasbord of colors, enemies and concepts. From the little color drops to the mole people who shoot beams to the fish that are also bear traps, you’ve got a full range of bananas-level concepts brought to life on screen. The levels have an excellent variety in locales and settings, moving from a small hamlet to the forest, the ocean and underground caves, finally circling back to the fortified walls of Lasha Castle. And the bosses are something to behold, exuding charm in terms of both setup through their anime cutscenes and the polygonal sprites. Hell, I would watch the anime cutscenes as a standalone now: it’s got that 90s Ranma ½ vibe that I positively adore, and the recent resurgence of Urusei Yatsura makes this stylization quite popular.

The soundscape is a give and a take in terms of enjoyment and overdone elements, and I tend to lean more towards the negative. On the one hand, the music is very poppy and upbeat, even during the crucial battles, which fits well with the atmosphere of this being a not-entirely-serious ordeal. The voicework comes through in a big way in the early sections, wherein Cotton and Silk constantly trade barbs and comments (all in Japanese) as they progress along. However, you get more and more fairies as the game continues, and they are also voiced…and don’t want to wait their turns. Which, by the time you hit the third stage, results in a cacophony of high pitched voices trilling to be heard over each other, plus the music and general sound effects. It becomes a bit too much, and induces headaches after prolonged exposure.

From this point, unfortunately, we have nothing but a downward slide in terms of Rainbow Cotton’s good points. The most glaring, awkward situation is the auto centering, which is a bane on the gameplay. With no way to turn it off, the game will constantly drag your reticle back to the center of the screen, regardless of where the enemy is, firmly ensconcing it out of your visibility if Cotton is also anywhere in the center of the screen. This starts as something a bit quirky and accelerates to hair-ripping frustration as enemies continue to move about the screen, oftentimes hiding in corners that you cannot easily target or deal with. It completely undermines the enjoyment factor because it’s like Joycon drift on steroids.

This alone would be enough to absolutely drag the game into the depths of despair, but we further then have constant clipping errors that hamstring Rainbow Cotton’s very sensibilities. Enemies will suddenly decide that walls and floors no longer constrain them, drifting in and out of existence like they’re extras at the Haunted Mansion or something. While the game’s limitations at least make sure they can’t shoot at you when they’re out of bounds, they can still rush you or drift back in, affording them ballistic surprise and annoyance value. Worse, when you’re desperately trying to shoot a heal or additional powershot from the pot enemy, the foe can just move outside your purview and leave you high and dry.

What ends up happening for Rainbow Cotton is a domino effect of bad luck and technical errors that cascade into a wildly unpleasant experience. The constant overlapping of shouting voices. The crosshairs insisting on recentering where nothing exists. Taking consecutive damage points from enemies who barely register on your radar due to not needing to follow the rules of physics. The rough interpretation of hit boxes on both sides of the fence, and an unclear distinction between if there is or isn’t collision damage for some things. Like most shmups, falling at any point means restarting at the beginning of the stage,  and it just felt personal when I had worked really hard to get to the end level boss. Even on the lowest difficulty, the game trips over itself with graceless execution to leave players throwing up their hands in frustration.

What rankles me the most is Cotton titles can be fun: I made a point to look and try Cotton Reboot! for myself, and the hyper cuteness and palette saturation work so well in 2D, with the devs working in a space they know best. But here, in this throwback to the unsteady days of 3D, the decision to not rework the shortcomings that were known over twenty years ago is astonishing. Maybe it was too difficult to incorporate, maybe it made the game too easy, I couldn’t tell you. What I can say is Rainbow Cotton is the magical girl wrapped version of a Cybertruck. Quirky and odd, the novelty wears off when you can’t control it and it ultimately crashes and burns, killing you with design flaws that the creators were well aware of.

Graphics: 7.5 Anime cutscenes are amazingly drawn and hit all the notes that I enjoy from that era of animation. Polygons for main game are chunky but cute, and, visually, the game delivers on multiple levels of engagement.	Gameplay: 2.0 Cotton handles like a fish on the line, flopping to the different corners of the screen while being firmly anchored in the center by the controls. Bullets may or may not hit depending on how the game feels. Powerups are wildly unpredictable in where they’ll go, leaving them fairly useless except for the shield item.
Sound: 5.0 Enjoyable music and cute voice acting run dry when everything begins overlapping and happening at once, resulting in a candy-coated headache. I like listening to AKB48, but playing every song at the same time results in me turning off the speakers.	Fun Factor: 1.5 Love the Dreamcast, love magical girls, love on-rails shooters. This should have been an easy game to score, and it pained me to have such a chore of a time playing through. After twenty minutes I didn’t want to touch the controller again, but I had to keep going, and here we are.
Final Verdict: 3.0

Rainbow Cotton is available now on PC, Playstation 4/5, Xbox Series One X/S and Nintendo Switch. The original version is available on the Dreamcast as well, Japan only.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Rainbow Cotton was provided by the publisher.