Cotton 100% Review

I’m a little concerned for Cotton’s health at this point; her obsession with candy, even the magical Willow variety, can’t be good. But this release of the Japanese-only 1994 SNES title lets us aid Cotton in her sugar addiction once again.

Given the adorable design of Cotton and her supporting cast it’s quite remarkable that the series as a whole never made a Western appearance so it’s really nice to see all the titles trickle over in recent times. Cotton 100% was the first home title in the series and is a side scrolling shoot ‘em up like the original arcade entry.

Even though it’s a different game, it takes a lot of inspiration from the prior arcade game, Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, with a lot of the enemies and basic mechanics being retained from that title. Tonally however the game is a lot brighter thanks to the SNES’ colour palette and the stages are mostly new.

The game is a fairly standard horizontal shoot ‘em up that doesn’t really do much to differentiate itself from others in the genre. Cotton can cast magic blasts in front of herself as well as drop bombs, and inflict major damage with a small range of special magic. The magic can be chosen from a selection of four combinations at the start of the game and provide limited access to powerful attacks.

Each of the game's seven stages has both a mid-boss and a final boss, with them being themed around the stage's visuals. There is a lot of creativity on display here with the bosses. From giant worms to possessed dolls, it keeps you wondering what you’ll encounter next.

Like the port of Panorama Cotton, the emulation here is fine and it includes a variety of nice quality of life improvements. These include remappable controls, a customisable CRT shader to emulate the look of era-appropriate televisions, a rewind function and the now obligatory save states to allow you to save and load at any point.

Sadly the story sequences throughout are untranslated, which — as with Panorama Cotton — feels like a missed opportunity with it being the first time the game has been available to a Western audience. Fortunately the adorably drawn and animated sequences illustrate events well enough for you to get the gist, and it doesn’t really affect the game in any way, but it is a shame.

The game itself isn’t won’t win any awards for clever mechanics or innovative gameplay but it is a competent and fun title. It’s definitely not as easy as the cutesy visuals would perhaps suggest, but the rewind feature and the ability to save and practice areas make it more approachable for new players than playing the original would be.

All in all Cotton 100% is a solid port of a previously unavailable, if fairly average, game. It’s wonderful to see games get a second lease of life and make their way overseas and it’s nice that we now have the vast majority of the Cotton series available even if this particular entry is unremarkable.