Rainbow Cotton – Test and News

The Cotton shoot'em up series continues its invasion of current consoles and at the same time that of a Western market that it has long put aside. We have the opportunity to finally discover this cute and colorful saga that we have often seen filling the import columns of some magazines, without ever really having the opportunity to play it. Rainbow Cotton thus arrives on Xbox consoles after a passage as exclusive as discreet in 2000 on the Sega Dreamcast.

A few weeks ago, we tested the Xbox Series/One adaptations of the games Cotton 100% and Panorama Cotton. Two shooters with a very different approach but which both enjoy Cotton's cute and colorful touch. This saga created in the 90s by the Japanese from Success Corporation has made a name for itself in the niche of shoot'em ups combining frenetic action with environments straight out of a candy store. With Rainbow Cotton, we touch on an episode representative of another era still different from that embodied by 100% and Panorama. Released exclusively on Dreamcast in 2000, Rainbow Cotton takes up the principle of Panorama's on-rails shooter, but in true 3D this time. This is therefore the opportunity to play a fairly rare (not to say extinct) genre of shooter, popularized among others by the legendary Space Harrier, and which many consider in the wake of the 2000s as having reached its “final form”.

Rainbow Cotton is the sequel to Panorama Cotton. There we obviously find the little witch obsessed with Willows, candies with magical virtues which are systematically at the origin of the tumults which shake the world. This time it's the villainous Tweed who has decided to get his hands on the Willows, disrupting the balance of the entire universe. To save the world, Silk and the other fairies must rely on their only backup: the witch Cotton. Making the latter believe that a competition is taking place in several villages and that victory will guarantee Cotton access to a unique Willow, the fairies ensure that the witch will help them – despite herself – to cleanse the world of hordes naughty ones. The always careful universe of Cotton finds its most accomplished expression with Rainbow Cotton: the game offers a very long introduction and very beautifully crafted animated cut-scenes. We also benefit from this new generation version of subtitles fully translated into French (like all the rest of the texts elsewhere). The friendly Japanese voices are always there to ensure a good atmosphere.

The hunt for bad guys and Willows results in five levels to go through, plus a final confrontation. Each of the environments offers a branch at a given moment, which allows us to bring a certain freshness to the successive parts, knowing that we are already facing relatively long levels here. We thus control Cotton with the camera placed behind his back and we shoot forward while of course retaining the possibility of scanning the screen from top to bottom and from left to right. You can shoot continuously, charge shots to eliminate several targets at once, or even use magic of four kinds, which you collect regularly throughout the levels.

If you have already approached this type of shooter from behind, you may be concerned about its readability. This is legitimate, especially since Rainbow Cotton on the Dreamcast was quite strongly criticized at the time for the too much space that the witch takes up on the screen, in fact masking the dangers facing the player a little too much. In this Remake (because it is indeed like a Remake that he presents to us and not a Remaster or a port), it is not perfect but it is still better. The move to the 16:9 display improves readability, while the work on the graphics rendering has made it possible to make the game more beautiful and a bit more detailed without creating additional readability concerns. We will certainly return to the impression of truly being faced with a pure and hard Remake by launching Rainbow Cotton on Xbox Series X|S, because we cannot decently speak of a profound change. All this lacks a bit of detail, of smoothing, we could count the polygons in places. But the game is no less pleasant to watch, thanks to its wonderful visual atmosphere, its cute and colorful touch that hits the mark, its inspired and animated environments from start to finish. A nice Dreamcast game in short, with an atmosphere enhanced by high-end musical compositions. Here again we feel something very “Sega Dreamcast”, a little something nostalgic certainly.

The best thing that happened to Rainbow Cotton with this Remake certainly concerns its handling. The Dreamcast version, otherwise accessible here under the name “retro mode”, was largely marred by controls that were borderline unbearable. The way the viewfinder automatically refocuses as soon as you let go of the stick makes you want to engage in witchcraft against the developers. Well know that with Rainbow Cotton version 2024, this defect disappears to make way for something completely controllable, sensitive enough but not too much, and equipped with a targeting indicator to make things easier. Contrary to this development, we wonder how on earth any explanation on the controls, on the basic mechanics of the game could have been forgotten! Absolutely nothing is specified, you have to discover on your own how things work with the risk of missing out on essential functionalities. All this is all the more annoying because Rainbow Cotton is not necessarily an easy game. You can easily fall on a tense passage and lose your life, which means returning directly to the start of the level and losing one credit out of the five (and not one more) offered at the start of the game. No checkpoint before the level boss, no save and even less rewind: the first few times are not easy. Note, however, that it is possible to play with two people on the same screen, to make progression a little easier while making readability a little more complicated.