Rainbow Cotton

Although there's room for improvement in ININ's presentation, and it would have been nice to get a few more bonus unlockables, this is still the best version of Rainbow Cotton around thanks to its silky smooth frame rate, lovely upscaling, widescreen formatting, and all-important gameplay enhancements. It's a fun, at times spectacular, novelty adventure in the Cotton universe, that can occasionally feel confusing and cluttered. Stick with it, though, and an enjoyable and genuinely charming rail shooter bubbles to the surface.

Rainbow Cotton has fun value, but there are some areas that can be improved upon to make the gameplay experience better. Still, fans of rail shooters should fly on this inexpensive and HD broom ride. Now soar and get those Willows!

Rainbow Cotton is an interesting peak into the history of Dreamcast gaming, but it lacks the gameplay upgrades and presentation flourishes to make it a genuinely enjoyable game outside of that context.

Seeing Rainbow Cotton back on sale is genuinely surreal

I’m glad it’s finally playable for an affordable price and outside of Japan. However, the original game had issues, very glaring issues that this release does nothing to fix.

Rainbow Cotton is a lot of fun. It's one of those games you can grab quickly and not have to drop hours on. The cutscenes between levels will make the kids giggle at the antics of Cotton and her friend as they journey to get candy.

The first game in the series to make the leap to polygons, Rainbow Cotton is a previously exclusive Japanese Dreamcast game that now makes its way to the rest of the gaming world.

Rainbow Cotton is a fun arcade-style shooter, but it has a couple of flaws.  While the game plays pretty well and I did enjoy my time with it, the lack of any information on even the basics of the game's mechanics as well as it sometimes being hard to see what Cotton's shooting at can make the game a bit more difficult than it should be, even on the easiest of difficulty settings.  It's still an enjoyable game, but a few additions could have made it even better.

Rainbow Cotton is fortunately a much better product than Panorama Cotton, the closest title I can compare it to. Sadly, beyond that little accolade and the fantastic soundtrack, it just feels rather limp when compared to the more traditional Cotton titles on offer for similar or even lower price points. I’ll never say no to more Cotton. If you are a fan of the franchise, then the HD graphics, English translation for the cutscenes, and lock-on feature make this an ideal way to play the game. But, if you are new to the franchise and want to know why there is seemingly a re-release every 6 months I would suggest looking at Cotton Reboot and considering picking this curio up on sale down the line.

Finally having Rainbow Cotton with us gives us a panorama (unintended pun) of the candy-hungry witch's virtual evolution. However, even though the game by itself is fine, it deserved more than a graphic upgrade, gameplay refinements and extra resources to make it totally modern instead of a mere revamped port.