ININ Games and Success have teamed up once again to release another game in the Cotton series. This time, they've done a complete remake of the Dreamcast rail shooter, Rainbow Cotton. The original game was only released in Japan, so fans in the rest world finally have an easily accessible way to play it when it's released on May 9th for $19.99 on all current platforms.
Rainbow Cotton never had the greatest reputation, so the idea with this remake was to improve on its flaws. Were they successful? Well... yeah, for the most part. There are some things that really annoyed me, but as I kept playing the game and learning how to deal with the hard stuff, I ended up enjoying it in the end. But, I'm a fan of the series. I like the characters and setting, so the whole presentation of this game definitely made it more enjoyable for me. It's still far from being the best rail shooter, but Cotton fans can have fun with it.
There are several things that I'd really like to see improved, though.
For starters, the game is as barebones as it gets. I'm playing on PC, and there are no video settings whatsoever. It seems to render at 1080p, which is a bit ridiculous when you can load up a Dreamcast emulator and play the original at 4K(ish), but it still looks good enough to me. I appreciate that it apparently runs at 240fps as well. The much more egregious flaw is with the control options - or lack thereof. You cannot remap any buttons, and despite the fact that two different buttons work as shot, neither of them have autofire. That is very annoying for a couple reasons. Your rate of fire from just holding the shot button is fairly low, and it's nowhere near the rate you can get by rapidly tapping shot. Now, you 'need' to hold shot in order to prepare your fairies for a homing attack, so permanent autofire wouldn't be good either. Having two shot buttons can easily solve this, except they both behave the same way. So you might think, okay, my controller has an autofire function built in, so problem solved, right? Wrong. I've tried 30hz, 20hz, and even 12hz autofire on my controllers, and none of them work properly. Cotton either doesn't shoot at all, or she might rapid fire for a few seconds before it stops working completely. It's unreliable, and therefore useless. I play with an arcade stick, so I can double-tap my shot button to get a decent rate of fire without straining my wrists/hands etc, but this sucks for people on regular controllers. Why can't we just have an autofire function built in, like countless other games? (FYI: external autofire works perfectly fine in the Dreamcast game)
They've also made some balance changes. The most obvious one is how Cotton controls differently. In the Dreamcast game, whenever you stop moving, she constantly starts snapping back towards the center of the screen, which makes it hard to aim. The remake controls much more naturally, as you'd expect it to. It also takes less hold time to 'ready' your fairies. This is an improvement all around.
Some of the other changes might be more questionable, particularly the last boss. In the original game, you can defeat her by the time she first stops flying and faces you. In the remake, she activates an invincibility shield every time she reaches ~75/50/25% health, until she gets to the next stop. This means you have to dodge several more waves of attacks, and a few of them are really annoying until you memorize some safe ways to deal with them. The lasers are the worst, because it's so hard to see where they're going to appear and where you need to move, but I find sticking to the bottom left corner during the first wave, and the upper left corner for the second wave gives you good enough positioning to react to most of it. If you find yourself about to get trapped, you can just use magic, which gives you a few seconds of invincibility to get through it. The only other thing to watch out for are the little demons that shoot you from the water, but staying at the top of the screen keeps you safe from almost all of them. Once you figure this stuff out, she's not an issue.
I feel like they increased the health of some of the bosses as well, with Medusa being the most notable. To balance this out, another change that they made in the remake is to always start you on the next stage with at least 50% HP. So if you almost died on a boss, you still have a fighting chance in the next stage. With that in mind, I think the health bump works out alright.
0:00 Intro
6:28 Stage 1
14:28 Stage 2
21:46 Stage 3
30:21 Stage 4
40:08 Stage 5
55:18 Final Battle
1:02:16 Ending
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Beat 'em Ups (e.g. Final Fight): • Beat 'em Ups
2D Action (e.g. Metal Slug): • 2D Action
STG/Shmups (e.g. Dodonpachi): • STG Replays
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