![]() Cotton also has a speed setting now as well with three gears to choose from. You can refill your health bar with rare drops from enemies or on reaching certain scores (which grant you extra points/lives). Your lives now act as a health bar, with each hit taking away a point from it. Enemies still drop crystals as well, but the drop rate seemed lower than in previous Cotton games. You can still use magic and the experience bar still exists to level you up. Some of Cottons traditional mechanics make it into this game as well. It may ape Space Harrier far too much in terms of how forward momentum works and the enemy movement, but the developers have tried to break up the pace and sense of movement by throwing in “side-scrolling” sections as well where Cotton flits back and forth across the screen as the camera pans to left or right into a new area. Gone too is the traditional fantasy game designs in favour of a more visually trippy experience. It ditches the side-scrolling 2D gameplay for a pseudo on-rails shooter in the vein of Sega’s classic Space Harrier. Panorama Cotton, the third game in the series, is actually the most intriguing of the releases. Sadly, the game still hasn’t been translated meaning that if you want to know what’s going on in those wacky cut scenes, you’re going to have to wiki it. It may not be very challenging unless you’re rolling on the harder settings, but it is a fun time to blast your way through. Visually, Cotton 100% is still a pretty looking pixel adventure. There’s a CRT filter overlay that you can tweak and finally, you can change the game’s screen ratio. Challenge mode is the original version of the game without the aforementioned features thus really making them the same version if you don’t use those features. ![]() Standard is the original game updated with some of today’s amenities, which include save states, cheats, and a rewind feature. There are two game modes, Standard and Challenge. This re-release for the game doesn’t come with much in the way of bells and whistles. The harder difficulty settings simply turn the enemies into massive bullet sponges. The last couple of levels do introduce a degree of cheapness, especially with that final boss, but it’s hardly unmanageable. As a schmup, Cotton 100% is on the easy side, even on normal. One hit kills are still the order of the day with each death weakening your attacks, costing you a fairy, and dropping the amount of experience you have accumulated. ![]() Killing these guys convinces the fairy to join you and helps to further empower your projectile attacks. Some enemies will drop power-ups but the ones you really want are the enemies that have a fairy circling them. This time though, they only grant experience when picked up. The experience system that powers up your attacks is still in play, along with magic crystals that enemies drop. Now there’s a bomb button for your bombs rather than one attack button for both your bomb and projectiles. Your attacks have also been separated as well. At the start of the game, you’ll choose your magic load out, giving you three spells to use that you can swop between. The magic system has been changed up as well. That said, the game reuses many sprites from the first game, including background elements, which make it feel like more of a redux of the first game, a remake in its own right. A side-scrolling schmup, Cotton 100% does make some changes to the game’s systems that help it stand out somewhat from the first game. Once again, as Cotton, you’re on your way to find yourself a Willow treat and defeat evil along the way. Mechanically and stylistically, the game is similar to its predecessor. To be clear, both of these games are standalone releases but for this review, we’ll be taking a look at both of them with a final score that speaks for each release.Ĭotton 100% is the follow up to Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams – or Cotton Reboot! if you’ve picked that up already. A remake of the original Cotton game – you can check out our review here – which paved the way for the following two games in the Cotton series to be released in the West, specifically Cotton 100% and Cotton Panorama. The stories themselves are also usually wacky and nonsensical as the games are really just about having fun while aiming for high scores.īack in July, Cotton Reboot! was released. The game mechanics are the same as its more renowned sibling, but the cute-em-up genre distinguishes itself by having cute characters and enemies for you to blast into oblivion. The Cotton series – which began in 1991 and was never released or officially translated for the West – is a sub-genre of the schmup genre, known as a “cute-em-up”. Welcome back to the world of Cotton, a game series focusing on the shenanigans of a pint size, sweet-crazed witch who will destroy anything in her path to get her hands on said eponymous sweets, known as Willow.
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