Despite the franchise being over 30 years old, I’ve never played any of the Cotton games. That changes today as I review Rainbow Cotton from developer Success and publisher ININ Games.

“Cotton, the legendary witch is back, and this time in 3D! Get ready for this formerly Japanese exclusive cute ‘em up gem to be “reconjured”. ININ and Success have teamed up once again to bring you a massively improved – and for the first time worldwide – re-release of Rainbow Cotton.”

A very brief history lesson for those not in the know. The first Cotton title, Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, was released back in 1991. The games are a series of popular, ‘cutey’ arcade shooters starring the eponymous Cotton the Witch. The original Rainbow Cotton was a Japanese exclusive which was released in 2000 when it met with some less than favourable reviews. Now, in 2024, Rainbow Cotton has been remade with a slew of new features. But, the big question is, is this remake of an almost 25-year-old game any good?

Before I get to my review, I just want to look at why the original 2000 game was not met with high praise. While the reviews back then said that the game looked great, they were less happy about the controls, one of the main bugbears was that Cotton would always recentre herself while aiming. This made the game awkward to play, especially when dealing with enemies that took several hits. Thankfully, this is one of the issues that has been rectified with this remake. Other new features include widescreen display, HD graphics, lock-on targeting, English localisation, subtitles and more.

The gameplay of Rainbow Cotton is a third-person, on-rails shooter. Think the Sega classic, Space Harrier, with a bit of the Sega classic, Panzer Dragoon mixed in… but more cute, and featuring a witch on a broom.  As I never played the original 2000 release, I can’t tell you if this remake is better or worse, which is kind of a good thing because it means that I can judge it on its own merits. What you get here are five stages of frantic shooting action. While only five stages may sound a bit low, I have to admit to being impressed with just how much is crammed into them. The five stages are pretty big and offer up a decent bit of variety. There’s plenty of flying over, under, around or even through obstacles. At certain points, you can choose different paths to take and see different things. This does add some replay value if you want to get the most out of the game.

Another negative that reviews of the original release was that Cotton herself takes up too much room, and this made it hard to see what you were aiming at. This remake seems to get around that by offering up a widescreen display, so you can now see more around you, and then there is the addition of the new lock-on targeting. As I was playing through Rainbow Cotton I have to admit to still finding aiming a bit tricky but, I can imagine that it is greatly improved over the original 2000 release. Perhaps if Cotton was slightly translucent, aiming would be further improved. You can power up Cotton’s firepower by simply taking out enemies and nabbing stars. It kind of works on an RPG level, in that you earn XP the more you kill and that XP will level up your firepower. You can also free up to five fairies that act as options. So with some deft shooting, you can get full firepower and have all five fairies helping you out too.

If you are interested, then Rainbow Cotton is going to set you back around £17, depending on your chosen platform, and it releases on the 9th of this very month for everything. Honestly, the price seems a bit high to me. I get that this is a full remake that has been built from the ground up and that it comes with a lot of new features and improvements that fix the issues that the original release had. Yes, this is also the first time that the game has been made available outside of Japan (unless you imported it back in the day). But, it is still a simple arcade shooter and there’s not really much more to it than that. You can play in Retro Mode if you want to emulate what it would’ve been like to play this back in 2000. There’s a two-player Co-Op Mode too, if you feel like tackling this with a friend. Still, I did enjoy my time playing through Rainbow Cotton, it is a fun shooter. However, I just don’t see myself coming back to it anytime soon, but if you are a big fan of the Cotton franchise, you may get more out of it than I did.