Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams

About Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams (1991) is Success's arcade shoot 'em up in which a sweet-obsessed young witch rides her broomstick through a dream world, the first Cotton game and a key title of the "cute 'em up" style.

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams in Depth

Reminiscent of Parodius, the game follows the young witch Cotton and her fairy companion Silk through increasingly difficult levels of a fantasy, dream-like world. Players blast monsters and dodge their shots while collecting crystal power-ups that strengthen Cotton's firepower and unleash magic spells, and bombs can obliterate enemies. It adds role-playing elements, letting players level up their attack through 13 levels, but each of Cotton's three lives allows only one hit, and the game ends when all are lost unless more credits are inserted. It uses a main two-button configuration, runs on Sega's System 16 hardware and supports multiplayer.

The world of Filament has been wrapped in an evil mist that brings eternal night. Silk asks Cotton to defeat the monsters spreading the darkness, and Cotton refuses until Silk mentions Willow candy, which she will do anything to get, sending her off on her broomstick to save the world and claim her reward. Unusually for an arcade game of the time, it used hand-drawn animation.

Making Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams

Success founder Takato Yoshinari produced the game, with Masaru Hatsuyama and Toshiyuki Kuwabara programming, Tamura and Shinobu Itō among the pixel artists, music by Kenichi Hirata and radio actress Takae Yoriguchi voicing Cotton. Sega published it in arcades in April 1991 and showed it at that year's AOU Show. It was popular in Japanese arcades: Game Machine listed it as the ninth most popular arcade game of May 1991, and it won awards at the 5th Gamest Grand Prize, including second place for Cotton herself among characters.

Hudson Soft brought it to the PC Engine Super CD-ROM² in February 1993, with CD audio and Tarako voicing Cotton in Japan, and Turbo Technologies released it in North America that April; critics praised its graphics and gameplay but some found the translation incoherent. An enhanced X68000 version followed in 1993, Cotton Original reached the PlayStation in 1999 to mixed reviews, Famitsu saying it was showing its age, and a Mega-CD port was never released. Cotton Reboot!, a remake based on the X68000 version, came out in 2021, and Retro Gamer counts the original among the key cute 'em ups.