Rainbow Cotton

Rainbow Cotton is a 3D rail shooter game reminiscent of Space Harrier and Panzer Dragoon where players assume the role of young witch Cotton alongside her fairy companion Silk. The plot involves an evil demon called Tweed, whose legion of followers steals a legendary Willow candy from York Country. In response, the queen of Fairy Country calls upon Silk, who drafts Cotton with retrieving the stolen candy. The game features gameplay similar to Panorama Cotton; the player flies through each stage, destroying constantly-moving formations of enemies and avoiding their projectiles and stage obstacles.

There are five stages total, which become progressively more difficult as the player progresses. Stages include towns and castles that take place across different environments. Each stage also has a massive boss that must be defeated in order to advance further.

Rainbow Cotton was mostly created by members at Success who were new to video game development at the time although with a few members, like composer Kenichi Hirata, that were already familiar with the Cotton series. Production was headed by Takato Yoshinari, the founder of Success. Mizuho Sasa, main programmer behind Cotton 100%, returned as planner and acted as co-programmer alongside Hiroki Honda and Hiromi Yoshizawa. Visual scenes were illustrated by Manabu Kenmochi, while Hironobu Terakado and Yusuke Nemoto served as co-designers.

Other people also collaborated in its creation process, such as sound designer Tetsuro "WASi303" Sato. During development, the game was made as a follow-up to Panorama Cotton and as such, was tentatively referred to as Panorama Cotton 2.

Rainbow Cotton was met with mixed to negative reception from critics, most of which reviewed it as an import title. Fan reception was negative; Readers of the Japanese Dreamcast Magazine voted to give the game a 3.6716 out of 10 score, ranking at the number 418 spot, indicating a low following. Possibly in response to this, designer Yusuke Nemoto retrospectively apologized for the game.

Consoles +' Maxime Roure criticized the compressed presentation of anime cutscenes and automatic centering of Cotton herself, but praised the colorful and animated visuals, audio and double gauge mechanic, regarding it to be "A nice and beautiful game, which suffers from its passage to 3D because of a limited playability." Likewise, GameSpot's Peter Bartholow commended the audiovisual presentation but heavily criticized the controls for being unrefined and frustrating, the automatic centering of Cotton and large size of her in-game model that limits the playfield, as well as poor animation and pacing of story cutscenes, stating that "Rainbow Cotton's core gameplay is so flawed that it leaves the overall experience unsalvageable. Even the most devoted Cotton fans will have a hard time embracing this most recent incarnation."