Arcade Archives: Fantastic Night Dreams Cotton

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This week's Arcade Archives release is... Fantastic Night Dreams Cotton or Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, I'm just going by what's on the storefronts (Success, 1991)

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Both the Japanese and World ROMs are included, but no Preference Settings are available. Be careful with the rapid fire settings though- they will cause the game's music to slow down, this is accurate to the original hardware if you fired too fast!

The world has been covered in darkness by wicked demons, banishing all into an endless night! If there's any hope of seeing the morning sun again, the world needs a brave heroine... Well, Cotton the witch isn't exactly jumping into the role. She's only interested in Willows, the delicious candy she craves. After she meets a fairy, Silk, begging her to save the world, Cotton just walks on her merry way... Until Silk mutters something about the legendary Willows of the fairy world. With an enthusiastic "LET'S GO!", Cotton sets off with Silk to save the world from eternal darkness and maybe get some candy along the way! As a witch, she's got her broom, a standard shot and an arcing bomb that you upgrade by grabbing crystals that drop from enemies as well as two colours of magic, red and blue, that have different effects depending on whether you hold one button or two. Silk the fairy also helps out by pummelling enemies, and additional fairies can be recruited and even sacrificed in battle.



Cotton was pretty dormant as a series for a good long while, but since around 2019, the witch is back, including a new version of the X68000 port that includes Pril from Trouble Witches as a bonus character, Cotton Reboot! that remade the game and included a mode based on the X68K port plus a whole slew of rereleases coverig pretty much the entire series aside from the Pachislot game... The original arcade game, however, has only resurfaced on the Sega Astro City Mini, until now. As mentioned by ohfivepro, this version of the game was playtested by TYR Yeti, a multiple-world-record holder for Cotton for the past 30 years, so yeah, it's damn accurate for sure! I must confess though, I don't have that much experience with Cotton. You'd think I'd be all-in on it- cute witch, Hallowe'en-esque setting and all that- but it's a pretty tough game for me, and I've never really sat down to properly figure it out, mostly because I need to be in the mood to really mash that fire button and it hasn't happened just yet. Still, the presentation is absolutely adorable, even if this arcade version doesn't have some of the graphical flourishes of the X68000 port (which, to my understanding, is generally considered the superior version), so if you want the pure arcade experience at home, this is very nice to have, but perhaps some might want to stick to the X68K mode in Reboot!, it's up to you~