Trivia / Cotton

• Creator Backlash: The note booklet for the soundtrack album Cotton Original Soundtrack features a statement from one of the 3D modeller on Rainbow Cotton, Yusuke Nemoto. After describing his role on the game, he follows it with "I'm sorry".
• Dummied Out: Rainbow Cotton originally featured a mechanic where Cotton could get off her broom and walk through the stages. The developer of the 2024 remake found remnants of it in the code and tried to reimplement it but ultimately could not due to time and technical constraints.
• Fan Translation:
  • On March 2, 2019, Panorama Cotton was successfully translated into English after several years of delays and various attempts. The patch can be downloaded here.
  • Cotton 100%, the Saturn version of Cotton 2 and Rainbow Cotton also received fan translations in 2021.
• Feelies: The Sega Saturn of "Magical Night Dreams Cotton 2" came with a full-color 1998 Cotton calendar.
• Franchise Killer: The polarizing reception to Rainbow Cotton on the Sega Dreamcast put the series on ice until Beep announced a reboot of the series in 2021. Despite this, a port for modern consoles was announced for Spring of 2024.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Something about this series eludes availability. All of the games sell for high prices in secondhand markets and none of the original Cotton games have been ported to any digital storefront. Not helping is majority of the games in the series being stuck in Japan. Panorama Cotton on the Sega Genesis and Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams on the TurboGrafx16 CD are probably the most infamous in this regard. The former had small production numbers in Japan (and had a collectors set to boot), and the latter had even less numbers due to the Turbo CD not being a high selling console in North America.
  • It seems like someone is a fan of the Cotton series and has been slowly giving the older games love on modern systems. The arcade version of Cotton was ported to Sega's Astro City Mini in late 2020, and the Sharp X68000 version of Cotton was included in the reboot. Cotton 2 and Cotton Boomerang are also getting ported to the Switch and PS4, along with the obscure shooter Guardian Force.
• Milestone Celebration: To celebrate the series' 30th anniversary, a slew of ports was released in 2021 worldwide (bringing many of the games to the West for the first time), beginning with Cotton Reboot! which also includes a Video Game Remake of the original and culminating in a brand new game, Superlative Night Dreams: Cotton Rock 'n Roll. As a result, nearly every Cotton video game is now available worldwide on Switch and PS4, with the exceptions being Rainbow Cotton.
• Newbie Boom: The 30th Anniversary, which saw two well-received new games and most of the series getting worldwide releases after much of it being Japan-exclusive and very expensive on the resale market, introduced Cotton to a new generation of fans. Tellingly, most of the games would get English fan-translations later that same year.
• No Export for You: Rainbow Cotton remains Japan-exclusive, as does Magical Pachinko Cotton.
• Sequel Gap: Rock 'n Roll marks the first new original Cotton video game in 21 years, and 18 years since any other original Cotton media (Magical Pachinko Cotton in 2003).
• What Could Have Been:
  • During the development of Cotton 2, an adult version of Cotton was planned as a playable character, but she was nixed in favor of her original design.
  • A third game, Cotton 3: Magical Century Legend, entered development after Cotton 2, but it never got past the draft stage. Some of the things planned for the third game were the introduction of new characters and an eyepatch-wearing Appli.