Cotton

~ COTTON ~

Success / Hudson Soft

Super CD-ROM

1993

It had been a number of years since I'd last played through Cotton when I decided to revisit it for this review, and I was able to recall pretty much nothing about it. That wasn't a particularly positive sign, but at least everything seemed fresh as I soared through it once again.

Cotton has neither the fast feel of a Thunder Force nor the memorization requirements of an R-Type. I suppose it's comparable to Air Zonk, as it employs "chunky" sprites and leans towards the cartoony side of things. There's nothing challenging about it aside from initial encounters with a boss or two, but there's plenty to shoot at.

The music is very catchy (particularly Stage 2's theme), and Success did some cool things with the visuals: observe the shaking terrain at the end of Stage 1 and the wavy background during the graveyard boss fight.

They also constructed some amusing between-stage cinematic sequences. The witch is a real nut; she'll be running rampant one minute and apologizing to a defeated boss the next. Incidentally, in the Japanese version, you can indeed view the text that accompanies these sequences in English.

Well, I probably won't remember anything about the game in two weeks' time, but it was fun while it lasted; and I think it'll still be enjoyable when I revisit it again a few years from now. Don't expect good value per your buck if you spend a lot of cash on the US rendition, but if you're thinking about buying the affordable JPN version, then I say go for it.