Rainbow Cotton

Listen to this post:

Along with the endless array of remakes and remasters that characterize the modern gaming landscape, there’s been a curious tendency toward grabbing up old, forgotten titles and making them a little more available to modern players. One such game is Rainbow Cotton, the last official game in the cute ’em up shooter series before it would go dormant for two decades. Released on the Dreamcast back in 2000, it’s now been saved from obscurity as you’re able to hop right on the broomstick once again in search of delicious Willow candy.

via YouTube

In a break from the typical Cotton side-scrolling style, Rainbow Cotton has more in common with shooters like Star Fox, or Panorama Cotton for the Sega Genesis. You follow behind Cotton and her many fairy pals as they broom their way across the land of Firmament, blasting cute baddies as they go. As you progress, you’ll unleash powerful magic spells to take out baddies, collect gems for points and power and explore a variety of branching paths that spice up each playthrough just a bit. You might even learn a little about yourself along the way…or not.

Whether or not this works particularly well is a little up in the air. Rainbow Cotton is certainly more chaotic than something like Star Fox, and it can take a little time to become acclimatized to how the familiar Cotton mechanics have been transferred to the new perspective. It can be a little difficult to aim at first, for instance, to say nothing of successfully dodging enemy fire. Fortunately, Cotton’s got a pretty generous health bar this time around and in the early stages there’s plenty of room to make mistakes.

Further, fairy pals and power-up gems are in ready supply if you keep your eye out for magic jars, so with luck you’ll have a fully-loaded arsenal ready to go. You can eventually have a whole swarm of fairies ready to take the fight to the bad guys.

Those bad guys really are the high point of the Rainbow Cotton experience. This shooter’s boss and mini-boss battles are a delightfully nostalgic slice of N64/Dreamcast-era goofiness without being so punishingly difficult that you can’t take a second to admire them. Whether or not you appreciate the shift to a 3D environment, it’s hard to deny that Rainbow Cotton maintains the series’ trademark saccharine charm.

Said charm is emphasized by Rainbow Cotton’s presentation, which is all soft rounded edges and adorable bad guys all the way down. Rainbow Cotton runs at a nice, smooth framerate and the remastered textures look lovely. If you’d rather it not look quite so lovely, there’s also a Retro Mode that crunches everything down, slaps on a filter and sticks it in a little TV-shaped window. It’s hard to say if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but the option certainly seems like a novelty rather than the intended Rainbow Cotton experience. As for sound, well, there’s subtitled cutscenes, and while that’s appreciated it’s also all you’re getting. The constant jabbering of Cotton’s fairies is going to remain a mystery. Maybe consider a Japanese class at the local community college?

It’s definitely a product of its era and it’s probably doesn’t measure up to the series’ highest notes, but that’s not saying you shouldn’t play Rainbow Cotton in 2024. At the very least, it’s one of those lost bits of gaming history that have been saved from the dustbin by an enterprising publisher, so it’s worth a look from that perspective alone. Beyond that, there’s no doubt that the recent localized Cotton-mania thanks to ININ has produced a new generation of fans for our witchy heroine, and for that group of aficionados it’s an easy recommendation.