~ COTTON ~
Success / Hudson Soft
Super CD-ROM
1993
A number of years had passed 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 made my
way through it once again.
Cotton is a sidescrolling shooter that features 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 couple of bosses, 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 produced some amusing cinematic sequences. The protagonist shows herself to be a real nut, running rampant one minute and apologizing to a defeated dragon boss the next. Incidentally, in the Japanese version, you can indeed view the text that
accompanies these wacky interludes 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.
