Cotton 100% Review

First released in 1994, Cotton 100% is based on the original Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, which itself first released in 1991 for arcades. Cotton 100% is the first entry in the Cotton shoot’em up, a.k.a. shmup, series. Over the course of the years, the game has been ported to a bevvy of platforms such as the Turbo Grafx 16, Neo Geo; among others. Which brings us to the game’s release on the Xbox family of console.

Cotton 100%, a.k.a. as Märchen Adventure Cotton 100%, tells the story of Nata de Cotton and Silk, her fairy friend, who’s looking for help to save the world that has been hit by a wave of darkness. At first our protagonist is reluctant to help the fairy… until she learns that her favorite candy, Willows, is waiting for her on the other side of the darkness. Without skipping a beat, Cotton changes her tune and heads off side by side with Silk to save the world from darkness.

As mentioned above, Cotton 100% is a 2D horizontal shoot’em up, or shmup, where players, playing as Cotton needs to go from point A to point B of each level killing every possible thing in sight and dodging their projectiles in order to survive. As with any other games in the genre, our little heroine can pick up power-ups that will help her navigate the treacherous levels.

However unlike the typical shoot’em up, Cotton 100% introduces light RPG mechanics in order to give players a leg up against the enemies. Killing enemies rewards Cotton with gems that she needs to pick up which will fill up an XP meter slowly and progressively increasing your attack power. However, death means you lose said XP having to start from scratch. It definitely ups the challenge because you want to be as strong as possible.

When starting the game, players have a choice of three types of attack patterns, a.k.a. magic. You always a default attack, which offers unlimited projectiles, but yuou also have two, very limited, special attacks which will dole out extra damage. You can for example shoot a blue lazer straight ahead that will ravage everything in your path or a rain of stars.

Thankfully, the development team has taking it upon themselves to add a few quality of life improvements given that this game dates back from the earlier 1990s. Akin to emulators, you can make save states at any times allowing you to restart from a specific point. While hardcore players can jump into Challenge mode (the normal difficulty from the original game), Standard mode also includes Rewind feature and cheats on top of the aforementioned save state feature.

Despite the game being from the earlier 90s, the visual still hold up today. while we’re constantly seeing games with the good old pixelated visual styling, Cotton 100%’s style is definitely one of the better looking pixelated games today; even when compared to newer releases. The visuals as a whole are quite pixelated and detailed. Everything has a unique color palette and it’s easy to distinguish enemies and their projectiles from the background. The soundtrack is surprisingly good and its chiptune sounds sounds great and it feels quite appropriate for the cutesy characters.

There’s actually nothing inherently wrong aside the fact that even on Standard mode, the game be challenging and cause a bit of frustration. I’ve also seen a few instances of questionable hit detection where it does feel like the detection box of Cotton is a bit too wide and you might experience some unjustified hit.

Cotton 100% is one of the best shmups I’ve played. Overall offers a fair challenge, boss battles are top notch and quite unique. Despite some questionable hit detection, there’s nothing that really deters the overall package. The question with the genre is its longevity. This is a great one for newcomers wanting to dabble in the genre but also will provide long time players of the genre (or Soulsborne fans looking for a different challenge). Either way, you can’t go wrong with Cotton 100%.