I can sing a rail shooter.
Developer Success’s flagship franchise since 1991, Cotton‘s enigmatic Halloween world and cutesy-witchy theme struck a chord with fans of the shoot-’em-up genre. Its zany premise of broomsticking across badlands in search of delicious candy, coupled with a magical mix of coloured gem grabbing, weapon power-ups, flashy bomb attacks, and mouthy fairies, have been staples in every instalment since the beginning.
Bar one pachinko outlier, most Cotton games follow the same 2D horizontal shooting format, including 2021’s Cotton Fantasy: Superlative Night Dreams. But with Panorama Cotton, a 1994 Mega Drive exclusive and one of the system’s most technically impressive titles, Success switched the action to a 3D perspective, plotting the camera behind Cotton’s back. It delivered a Space Harrier-style dynamic across eye-bleedingly colourful stages, occasionally with varying paths. Despite being a graphical showcase for the system, it wasn’t as critically well-received as its predecessors, never appeared overseas (until 2021), and had a famously low print run.
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