Rainbow Cotton is a weird title that comes with its own weird little rabbit hole. This 3D on-rails shooter originally released for the much-loved Dreamcast back in the year 2000 to mixed reception from players and critics. While the Cotton series wasn’t new at the time the team working on Rainbow Cotton for the Dreamcast was. Most of the team were new to video game development, and it showed.
Look, I’m really glad to get another Cotton game released for modern platforms, and ever more excited to see a non-Sega created Dreamcast game get some love, but Rainbow Cotton is a weird choice. The game plays along the lines of a Panzer Dragoon, only much more basic. The game at its release had such a mixed reception, even in Japan, that those middling reviews pushed designer Yusuke Nemoto to apologize for the state of the game.
This remastering tries to bring the game up to modern standards, but when you are working with a title that wasn’t all that great to begin with there is only so much that you can do. The one really glaring issue is something that also was a problem with the original: the anime cut-scenes. It’s not that these cut-scenes look bad, (they are actually a lot of fun and super cute) it’s that they are so compressed that it look like you’re watching an anime from the 80s on a well-played VHS. All that seems to have been done is the cutscenes were run though a cheap upscaler like you can do on CapCut Pro for less than $10.
The original game got a lot of grief for this and it’s the one thing many fans of the original hoped would be fixed in this remastering. It does look better as it’s now watchable, sure, but it’s nowhere close to where it should be. Maybe they didn’t have access to the original raw movie files but it really does take away from the overall experience. There is also no English voice acting added to the game as they simply baked on English subtitles over the cut-scenes.
Gameplay is basic and gets the job done but lacks depth and comes with a coupe of quirks. The shooting itself doesn’t feel off, rather, it feels strange. This might be due to the fact that the game uses an automatic centering system that makes it feel like its fighting against you and where you want to be shooting, always moving you back to the center of the screen. There are also issues with collision detection. There were lots of times where I felt like I was hitting something but wasn’t, and times when I got hit when I felt I should have avoided it. You can imagine how this would be a problem when playing an on-rails shooter.
But it’s not all that bad. Rainbow Cotton looks fantastic when in motion. The large models and the weird looking enemies and bosses all really pop. The action is fun and as someone who loves on-rails shooters I had a blast, and despite the issues I kept wanting to play the game. That said, those really nice looking graphics and models come at a cost as our lead heroine is so large that she takes up more of the screen that I would like making avoiding attacks harder than they should be. This, of course, is made all the worse with the less than stellar collision detection. Then there are all the faeries that you can save during play that fly about taking up more screen real estate. Things get cluttered fast!
Its just a real shame that more wasn’t done to fix the issues of the original Rainbow Cotton release, especially as so many people never got the chance to play it as it never officially came West. This was the perfect opportunity to update the game, but I understand releasing a simple, if poor remastering that doesn’t stray from the game. What I don’t understand is the new problems that this release adds to an already problematical game. At the time of this writing there is an issue with the achievements that pop up on the Steam release. Every time one pops, there is a chance the game locks up for a split second, something unacceptable for a shooter.
Rainbow Cotton also features the absolute worst auto-fire system that shoots at a snails pace when holding down the shoot button. It’s actually so slow that it’s nearly useless in game, especially when so many of the larger baddies tank damage. I hope you don’t love your thumb because you are going to be mashing “A” the whole time you play fighting against lactic acid buildup in your hand. There is also a distinct lack of extras with no instructions, no extra unlocks, no history of the series, and only a single Retro Mode that adds a CRT filter to the game. I haven’t seen a bare-bones release like this one in a long time.
Rainbow Cotton is an average game made only worse with this remastering. They didn’t fix anything and managed to add new problems to the experience. But I hate ending on a bad note and at the very least they did add a dedicated “Shut The Fuck Up” feature in the options that turn off your fairy friends from talking to you every couple of seconds. Seriously, these little fairy things don’t shut up when playing in the standard mode.
I can’t help love Rainbow Cotton despite how poor a remaster this release is as it fixes nothing and manages to add new problems the didn’t exist before
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