It’s 1978. You and your friends have just squandered your weekly pocket money in the arcade, trying your hand at the revolutionary Space Invaderswhat we could consider the first famous exponent of the genre “shoot ’em up“. Here: imagine that evening going to bed, tired and impoverished, but full of desire for revenge, anxious to break the record of your friend – Suddenly you wake up and it’s 2022. Now the arcades are pastimes of the country, circuses of LED lights and smeared memories. After being reintroduced into society, an ancient curiosity prompts you to investigate the fate of that title that in your youth had given you so much fun, between a blasphemy and a few wasted tokens too much. Discover his long legacy: a forgotten universe, whose boundaries are lost in space and time. Colors, bullets and madness, genres and subgenres. But a game catches your attention, a title with a spicy flavor and ‘Japanese’ excessive. Cotton Reboot! Do you know what we are talking about? Well then…
- Title: Cotton Reboot!
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4
- Version analyzed: Nintendo Switch (EU)
- Gender: Shoot ’em up
- Players: 1
- Publisher: ININ Games
- Developer: BEEP
- Tongue: English (lyrics), Japanese (dubbing)
- Exit date: July 21, 2021
- Availability: retail, digital delivery
- DLC: nobody
- Note: revised, corrected and expanded version of the 1991 classic released on arcade cabinets and Sharp X86000 computers
We have reviewed Cotton Reboot! with a Nintendo Switch code provided to us free of charge by ININ Games.
Let’s Go!
Directly from 1991 it arrives on Nintendo Switch Cotton Reboot!reinterpretation of the classic arcade Cotton: Fantastic Nights Dream, the first of a long series of titles starring the nice little witch Nata de Cotton, a lover of “willow” candies, and Silk, her enchanted companion with persuasive shapes. The game belongs to the so-called “cute ’em up” subgenre, a branch of shoot’ em up that has a fun and spicy style as its main feature, which is not ashamed to flaunt the shapes of its uninhibited all-female cast. Don’t worry though! The Cotton series, unlike its older sister Parodius, remains at more than acceptable levels, making this package eligible for even the smallest players.
The scalability of the experience contributes: while inevitably presenting peaks of difficulty, you can change both the difficulty level and the number of lives at your disposal, making the game accessible to everyone (be careful though: changing this last parameter will prevent you from entering the ranking even if you totalize a mind-boggling score!). One shot will be enough to ‘die’, yet the game will restart in a second, without therefore dampening the rhythm of a title that makes its controlled frenzy one of its strengths. Even if you continue to be defeated, thus losing all the lives at your disposal (base 3), you will still have a fifteen second window to click on “Retry” and resume exactly where your game left off.
Since 1991 with fury
This is of course the system designed by the developers of the Sharp X68000 version for personal computers, proposed again within this tasty package, to replace the mechanics of the tokens and, unfortunately, it does so in a somewhat renounced way. While the possibility of actually having infinite lives makes the game less frustrating, it inevitably ends up eliminating some of the tension. Don’t think, however, that lack of attention is not punished. Cotton is a rather atypical shoot ’em up, in which, by collecting gems (obtainable by defeating some enemies), in addition to unlocking the use of spells, you will level up, increasing the radius of your’ bullets’ and transforming your witch into a fighter-bomber. If you take damage, however, you will lose half of the experience, leveling down and sacrificing part of your war potential.
In short, the more you lose the more difficult the game will become… making you lose again and catapulting you into a decidedly unpleasant slapping round. Thankfully, save for some poorly focused mechanics, such as being able to fire only in one direction even when the stage design would require more flexibility or the need to keep hitting the gems to keep them in the air and be able to collect them, Cotton: Fantastic Nights Dream it is as enjoyable today as it was yesterday. Joy-Con can make some movements a little jerky, but the responsiveness of our avatar is truly amazing.
Revamped!
For now, however, we are talking exclusively about the version created for PC X68000proposed with love and philological respect in this new edition. But Cotton Reboot! it is much more than that. In fact, the package, in addition to including a timed mode in which to try your hand to quickly earn a place in the ranking and unlock new characters, offers a real remake of the original, the full-fledged star of this re-edition. Cotton’s “Arrange Mode” is not limited to reviewing the technical sector of the game and introducing support for the 16: 9 format, but it intelligently distorts the play sector: the ability to deflect shots fired at gems (which no longer fall when not hit and feature three new colors, each corresponding to a different effect) and to increase the level of spells, as well as a greater emphasis on scoring (exasperated from the addition of the “Fever” bar, which turns enemies into score multipliers), make this version a galvanizing experience.
The news doesn’t stop there: the number of enemies and projectiles on the screen has increased significantly, as has the speed of movement through the stages; the bosses (whose design has been slightly modified in some cases) have received new move-sets, amplifying the sense of challenge of the game. If the action has lost something in terms of cleanliness and readability, the rhythms are extremely more voracious than in the original approach Cotton Reboot! almost more like a bullet-hell than a simple shoot ’em up, building on the achievements that the genre has achieved over the years.
Cotton Reboot! The greatest celebration of the cutest action heroine in video games! Japan’s favorite shooter mascot lands in a beautiful HD game with stunning graphics and remastered soundtracks. This is the original “cute ’em up” that will bewitch you by testing your skills, as Cotton and his friends are finally back in the biggest celebration of one of Japan’s most beloved video game mascots. Choose between HD reboot mode or X68000 original mode with the perfect graphics of the iconic Japanese home computer.
Buy Cotton Reboot! for Nintendo Switch following this link at the special price of € 39.56 (instead of € 59.99). Available from November 19, 2019. Support Akiba Gamers by purchasing the game on Amazon through this link!
Who do we recommend Cotton Reboot !?
Cotton Reboot: Fantastic Night Dreams is a title with great personality and undoubted historical value, which deserves to be ‘tasted’ by anyone who has ever spent a few pleasant hours in the arcade. The product is clearly the son of an ancient development philosophy, with much simpler and more direct ways than those of today. On the other hand, water has passed under the bridge since 1991, and you don’t need to go into the triple A market to realize how much the video game has changed. Independent titles such as Cuphead, made by just a handful of people, have collected the legacy of the arcade masterpieces of the past, reworking it in a fresh and surprising way. Even within the triple A scope, it is undeniable how titles of the caliber of Ikaruga and Nex Machina have respectively influenced works such as NieR: Automata and the recent Returnal (moreover developed by the same Housemarque of Nex Machina). Although the shoot ’em up genre, therefore, has already shown its limits for some time, it is evident that in Cotton (and many others) it is possible to see the roots of the modern video game, making the purchase of Reboot! an act of love towards the medium himself.
- Excellent gameplay
- Packaged with care
- Fast-paced and fun Arrange Mode
- Few extra content
- Price too high
Cotton Reboot!
The price of nostalgia
Cotton Reboot! makes for a luscious package for any fan of the genre shmup. The more calculated rhythms of the original and the frenzy of version Arranged make this combo of titles speak to both the most experienced and inexperienced players. Everything is mixed in a coherent way, under a witty stylistic patina and always faithful to itself: from the tutorial to the narrative interludes, from the design of the stages to that of the enemies, everything embodies the typically over the top style so much in vogue in Japanese entertainment. of the 80s. Do not think, however, that the classicism of Cotton make the title obsolete. The immediacy of the controls and the depth of the mechanics (which at first can be confusing) make the X68000 version as enjoyable as the one Reboot !. However, it is the latter, in our opinion, that increases the value of a package which, however, cannot really pay back the access price. If on the one hand the developer BEEP has done a great job in giving gamers back a long-forgotten cult, on the other hand the panorama of current development has accustomed us to expect a little more from arcade titles, perhaps even at a lower price. In short, operations of this type are welcome, but only if supported by a mass of content aligned with industry standards.
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