Rainbow Cotton Review – Silly Magical Anime Witch

There’s a light charm to the classic 80s and 90s anime visual style that appeals to many anime fans, but it’s not something for everybody. And yet, something like that can be overlooked in a video game if everything about the gameplay excels in quality and fun. This is not the case with Rainbow Cotton, an HD remastered rail shooter that is stuck on the hurdles of the past. Even if you’re a big fan of cute anime characters and magical powers, it can be a struggle to enjoy this 3D rail shooter.

Game Name: Rainbow Cotton
Platform(s): PS5 (Reviewed), Switch, Xbox Series X/S
Developer(s): United Games Entertainment
Publisher(s): ININ Games
Release Date: May 9th, 2024
Price: $19.99

Originally released on the SEGA Dreamcast, Rainbow Cotton is the fifth entry of the Cotton series of shooters. While most rail shooters of its time included spaceships and explosions, the Cotton games focused more on goofy characters and the use of magic. You take control of a young witch named Cotton, who is on an adventure to recover a stolen candy called Willow from a demon known as Tweed. She must use all of her magical abilities to repel a legion of cute animal enemies as she flies through the land to recover the Willow Candy.

Magical Witch Who Needs Candy

The story and visuals are exactly what you might expect if you watched any kind of classic magical girl anime series. The cutscenes in-between stages look as if they’re pulled straight out of the late 80s and early 90s, while the gameplay visuals are that of the Dreamcast era. Although the 3D models are colorful, they definitely show their age with a number of visual bugs and clipping on some characters and parts of the stages. For some people, this won’t be a big deal, but it’s only the start of a slippery slope that Rainbow Cotton thrusts you down.

The biggest problems come going through each stage and shooting enemies you encounter. Often you’ll be flown into a giant group of enemies that bombard you with projectiles and try to crash into you. Like most rail shooters, you can’t fly around freely and instead need to dodge from side to side. This becomes a major problem when most of what is coming at you is far off to the sides of the screen where it’s harder to see, as well as when so many enemies take up the screen and block your view.

None of this is helpful when you’re trying to aim as you’re moving around. The target reticle can be obscured by not only your own magical shots, but by Cotton herself because of the camera placement. This makes it annoyingly difficult to see where you’re aiming or what you’re about to hit. Trying to shoot enemies that move around erratically while this is happening turns sections that should be very simple into an annoyingly difficult struggle. This is only made worst with how sluggish it feels to steer Cotton’s broom, which does not help when you need to quickly react to objects coming into view.

Some Helpful Magic

There are a few helpful abilities that alleviate the issues in some cases. Cotton can use her fairy companions to lock onto enemies, like a homing shot from other shooters. It can be a great attack, but isn’t always a solution to enemies that require multiple hits to bring down. And what’s worse is how you’ll need to find magic pots that can free extra fairies to lock onto multiple enemies at the same time. The game is generous with how many opportunities you have to get this in each stage, but also can overwhelm you enough that you might often miss them.

Cotton’s magic attacks are also a good, but very limited tool to use. Shooting at magic pots can yield a crystal that gives you one of a few magic attacks that damage everything on the screen. This is good for groups of enemies or boss battles to regain control of the area, but you’ll have to find extra magic pots in a stage to gain more. They often appear at random during a stage, but won’t show up when you’re in a boss battle by the end of a stage. This can make some sections difficult if you’re constantly being overrun by enemies and projectiles, where the only way to avoid getting badly damaged is to have a magic spell available.

The most disappointing aspect of Rainbow Cotton is just how meager the package is. There’s hardly anything beyond the main game and a few additional features. While the visuals are given the HD treatment over the original game, there is little to no extra content. The main menu has both co-op and a retro mode to try out, which adds a scan lines filter and standard 4:3 aspect ratio to the screen. This is neat if you want to play the game like it was before, but is a very short-lived feature that won’t do much for everyone. The co-op mode allows a second player to control Cotton’s fairy companion Silk, but it takes away the lock-on ability for Cotton. It’s nice that there’s an option to play with another person, but hardly anything interesting will come from doing so.

If anime and arcade rail shooters are your jam, then Rainbow Cotton will offer something to check out. But the archaic difficulties that you’ll run into can be really detrimental to the fun. It feels like more effort could’ve been put into tweaking Rainbow Cotton a bit more beyond the visuals. That probably would’ve made a big difference. But as is now, you won’t be missing much if you decide to skip over it.

Rainbow Cotton is available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X/S.

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