The 30th anniversary of the Cotton series of Shmups has never slowed down and it has certainly kept ININ games and Strictly Limited Games busy and now we head back to 1994 for our Cotton 100% review which gives us a game of great fun for as along at lasts.

Cotton 100% Review – Back to the 90’s

1994 Super Famicom Release

Westerners were just not catered for when it came to the Cotton series of games but now they have arrived in plentiful amounts with this being the 1994 release – Cotton 100%.

Playing as young witch Cotton you will battle over seven stages to defeat the evils of darkness. Now, I say darkness but there is very little dark in this game as everything is full of vibrant colour which all holds up really well in the modern day. There is a plot to the game but as with Panorama Cotton the story has failed to be translated from the original Japanese and I am still at a loss as to explain why this has been missed or just ignored. There is really little excuse for the text not to have been translated into English and as with Panorama, it’s just such a bad first impression.

Boss Battles To Delight and Challenge

As you pass through each stage of the game you will meet three bosses. A fairly easy to beat boss, a medium challenge and then a final boss that is usually bonkers and tougher than old boots to beat. The bosses are well designed and great fun with my favourite being a pumpkin that throws other smaller pumpkins at you and just won’t seem to die without one hell of a fight.

Cute, Fun But Oh So Slow

When you think of 2D scrolling shoot em ups you tend to think of fast scrolling and enemies coming at you at pace but in Cotton 100% it is a pretty pedestrian affair. The game scrolls and then stops while you have a fight with a few minions and then off it sets again. It makes the games ridiculously easy to beat even in the mania mode. The game is cute to look at and it really is fun for maybe three hours at most but after that it’s not got much life left in it sadly.

Cotton 100% Review Verdict – One For the Fans

If you are fans of the Cotton series then I can say you will enjoy this port as it remains true to the original games and is certainly a collectors item. For anyone else it is just so hard to recommend it because it isn’t as good today as it was back in 1994. It is just a harsh reality that sometimes games stand the test of time and sometimes they don’t. Cotton 100% is somewhere in the middle and it’s okay, nothing more.

6/10