YMMV / Cotton

• Awesome Music: The PC-Engine soundtrack.
• Demonic Spiders: Those green, one-eyed bipedal creatures. Not only they take quite a bit of punishment, if left alone for too long they shoot a thick laser beam which sweeps the screen in front of them, meaning you're dead if you're in any place in front of them.
• I Knew It!: A negative example - When it was announced that City Connection would be bundling Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang, and Guardian Force into a Compilation Re-release, given their previous track record with Psikyo ports, shmup fans were expecting these games to have a significant amount of input lag, as the Psikyo games have about 7 frames of input lag. When Cotton Guardian Force Tribute was then released, fans were sadly proven right, as the games average 10 frames of input lag!
• Memetic Mutation: 10 frames of input lag^Explanation Upon release, the Saturn Tribute rereleases of Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang, and the unrelated Guardian Force were discovered to have a devastating 10 frames of input lag, more than any other shmup on Switch or PS4 port. City Connection, the team in charge of the port and already having a bad reputation for Psikyo ports with 7-8 frames of input lag, turned into a complete laughingstock and the target of much ire within the shmup community, for allowing such a product to be released onto the market.
• Misblamed: A lot of fans are quick to entirely blame City Connection for the 10 frames of input lag in Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute, but they are really only responsible for about half of that input lag. The games in that package each already have 6 frames of lag, which for many is already middling or barely tolerable, the Saturn Tribute versions simply made it worse.
• Periphery Demographic: Shortly after the release of Cotton Guardian Force Tribute, it was revealed that the games run off a Sega Saturn emulator that can be tweaked to run any Saturn game of the user's choosing, causing people to buy the Tribute games just to play Saturn games on their Switches.
• Porting Disaster: It seems in the efforts to bring Cotton to eighth- and ninth-generation consoles, a lot of mistakes are being made:
  • Upon release, Cotton Guardian Force Tribute was quickly criticized for having 10 frames^note 1/6 of a second of input lag! One would assume that this is due to the Switch having inherent input lag of its own, but the PS4 version of the compilation has almost as bad results. The most likely factors are the games already having 5 frames of input lag on native hardware and the Tribute ports using the SSF Sega Saturn emulator to run these games, with SSF itself known for having its share of input lag^note Plus in general, Sega Saturn emulation is notoriously unreliable; this is perhaps why there are very few emulation ports of Sega Saturn games and why Nintendo passed over Sega Saturn for Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online libraries but have done Nintendo 64 ports for those services, with the more high-profile Saturn ports like those of NiGHTS into Dreams… and Radiant Silvergun instead being remastered and natively coded for their target platforms. While City Connection would later address this and release a patch to correct this, players have found that the input lag has been improved by around 3 frames at best, meaning they still have to contend with 6-7 frames of input lag. The ports do have some handy practice options like savestates and rewinds, but all the convenience features in the world don't mean much when the games play with horrible input delay.
  • The Switch and PS4 ports of Panorama Cotton suffered from missing sprites in their initial releases, causing the player to be hit for what seems to be no reason whatsoever. This was patched for both platforms a few weeks later.
  • The Steam port of Cotton Reboot! is a lazy and barebones port with no PC-related options. At launch, it locked to 720p whereas the console versions runs at 1080p, uses a pre-defined keyboard layout that can barely be changed, features DualShock and a few Switch controller prompts all over the place when most PC games commonly uses Xbox controllers or a keyboard, and has no built-in way to quit the software unless the player presses Alt+F4 or close the game in windowed mode. All of this and an unjustifiably high price tag of $45 price tag for the Steam version. A March 2022 update at least brought it to parity with the console versions by adding 1080p support, proper controller support and an exit button although it's still more expensive than the console releases.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Cotton Reboot! does not reset your score when using continues in either version of the game. This might not seem like a big deal, however scores achieved with continues can be submitted to the leaderboards which completely kills any sort of competitive spirit for them since enabling continues also enables some really obnoxious strategies for farming points and there are very few penalties for dying, and none specifically for continuing. Furthermore, as only the highest score achieved in either version is saved locally, if you use a continue and then set a higher score than your no-continues best score, that score will be overwritten, so you pretty much have to manually keep track of your no-continue scores.
  • In Cotton 100%, shots auto-fire, but bombs (as in your air-to-ground attack, not your magic attacks that serve as Smart Bombs) don't. Attempting to hold down the bomb button will just prepare a charged special move. Have fun Button Mashing throughout the entire game unless you invest in a controller with a rapid-fire feature.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: After the ill reception of Rainbow Cotton caused the series to grind to a halt, Cotton Fantasy is regarded by many as a return to form, featuring a refinement of the earlier games' sidescrolling gameplay and bringing many other characters along for the ride for a wide variety of playstyles.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Originally, the Japanese version of Reboot! had English text, but was then patched out. Fans were not happy about this, believing they had been punished for importing the game and not wanting to wait months for a delayed localization (as the Japanese version was released before the Western versions even had release dates). Thankfully this was not the case for Cotton Rock 'n Roll / Cotton Fantasy, which retains its foreign language settings even after the overseas releases.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Fantasy has bonus stages where you fly in a behind-the-back perspective like in Panorama Cotton and try to get as many teacups as you can. However, this is the only use of this gameplay format. While you do have a weapon that you can shoot, there are no enemies to shoot with it.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Cotton is widely disliked in-universe and Silk dreads having to ask for her help because Cotton will simply tell her to piss off until Silk brings Willows into the equation. That said, she's easily one of the most recognizable human characters in shmups, and many fans adore her because she's a self-serving hero who cares more about Willows than anything rather than just being a generic savior protagonist.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: As a late release on the Genesis, Panorama Cotton boasts one of, if not the most colorful and gorgeous games on the console. Unlike many isometric games at the time, the graphics are technically impressive without sacrificing clarity. The sprites are large and expressive with colorful designs, the levels are filled with impressive effects such as deep parallax, scaling and rotation, warping and faux-mode-7 effects, and even pseudo-polygonal corridors that don't get in the way of gameplay aside from some unfortunate moments of slowdown. Simply put, this game shames many SNES titles, and stands alongside her more celebrated brothers Vector Man and Gunstar Heroes with ease.