Cotton 2: Magical Night Dreams

7 min readMay 13, 2018

The Sega Saturn was a real goldmine for shmups, being identical on a hardware level to Sega’s ST-V arcade cabinets. Since the 3D capabilities of the Saturn have a noted history of being a huge pain in the butt, the games it’s usually remembered for are 2D powerhouses that, at most, use 3D as more of a backdrop or a special effect, like Guardian Heroes, and shmups were one of the best genres for that. You don’t need that much extra depth perception for Radiant Silvergun or Tera Diver, right? You just need ’em to be cool to look at.

Well, Cotton 2 isn’t the best shmup on the Saturn. The controls are floaty, and your hitbox is huge, and the level design can feel a bit cluttered, not to mention it’s got a pretty bizarre control scheme that takes influence from… fighting games, for better or for worse? But it’s a helluva pretty game, with a strong personality and really fun mechanics.

Back in 1991, the first Cotton was one of the earlier cute em ups, and it defined itself with its dark, magical enemies and environments. In keeping with that, Cotton 2 has you shooting giant green dragons and pumpkins, smashing up groups of bats against the backdrop of towering castles and old musty caves and large fields in the middle of the night.

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams (PC Engine)

But while Cotton 1 was a pretty standard shoot em up in its design, and one that’s much less forgiving than Cotton 2 in giving the player an enormous hit box without any kind of health bar, Cotton 2 is a way more approachable game in just about every way.

First off, it gives you a pretty generous health bar, and one that you can replenish and even set the size of in the options menu, along with the number of lives you begin with, and by entering a code even lets you choose whether to map the game’s special attacks to the Saturn’s extra buttons, or use them for autofire. It saves your options too, so you don’t have to do it every time you start the game, thankfully.

Speaking of, Cotton 2 gives you a decent variety of special attacks, the most important being Catch, which lets you grab enemies and projectiles out of the air and toss them, similar to Mischief Makers. Most of them are basic, tornado shoots a quick burst, wide is just the classic spreadshot, side-d and side-u let you fire a spread above or below, and the most simple one, bubble, can be executed just by double-tapping in a direction and firing, making it the one you’ll most likely be using the most should you prefer to stick with the awkward button inputs that the original arcade game typically asks you to do.

Magic isn’t one of those special attacks, it’s more like your bomb. It lets you turn whatever magic you’re currently using into a highly concentrated elemental blast, switching over to the next element you’ve got queued up. There’s something you really need to keep in mind with this though, and it’s that you only pick up elements from crystals, and if you don’t have any elemental magic left, you can’t use your special attacks to bubble up enemies. If you can’t bubble up enemies, then you can’t do crazy stuff like this.

Basically, the entire scoring system is built around this bubbling up mechanic. If you bubble an enemy and they come into contact with another enemy, that enemy will explode and add to your chain. If that enemy is touching another enemy as they explode, that also explodes and gets added to your chain. It’s simple, and it feels really gratifying.

Once that chain ends, a white orb pops out and gives you more points when you collect it depending on how big the chain was. All of this put together, Cotton 2 isn’t so much satisfying for being a challenge as it is for how punchy everything you can do feels. Tons of shmups have chain systems, but there aren’t really any that have one similar to Cotton 2’s, and that’s where the variety of basic attacks the game lets you execute get their use. The button inputs might be a bit cumbersome, but I can’t really think of any game that plays exactly like Cotton 2, and I’m not sure any other game that did play the same would have an equally fun personality.

The basic plot of the Cotton series is… not very complicated. It all focuses around a bratty, selfish witch named Nata de Cotton, and her only purpose in life is to eat Willows, magical candies that are important to the world’s magic. In every game, Cotton catches wind of nearby Willows and heroically drags her fairy sidekick, Silk, off on an adventure to go eat them. She never does.

Cotton 2 opens with Cotton and Silk crashing into Appli ke Pumpkin, an equally bratty witch who is the princess of the Pumpkin kingdom, and her talking hat, Needle. Appli stole a Water Willow from the castle and, on the run, accidentally dropped it in the woods. You can guess where Cotton’s priorities lie.

This is just the backdrop for the game’s goofy, expressive cutscenes, which show the characters bouncing off of each other after every stage. I can’t read enough japanese and I definitely can’t read it fast enough to follow the dialog, but the good news is that for Cotton 2, you don’t really need to.

Cutscenes in Cotton 2 consist entirely of shifting portraits flying around the screen, the art is charming and expressive and it has a fun sense of comedic timing that makes it enjoyable to watch, even if you can’t read any of the text. It has more energy than Cotton 1’s more limited full-screen interludes, which look more like slideshows in comparison. Cotton 2 is just fun to look at.

So what about bosses? Well, Cotton 2 isn’t exactly a masterpiece of level and boss design, but that’s another area where the game is elevated pretty strongly by its visual style and mechanics, every boss making heavy use of bizarre 2D rotation effects. At worst, they look cool and they don’t waste too much time, so you won’t be getting stone-walled at them like the, uh, stone wall from Cotton 1.

A few of the highlights would probably be the boss of stage 1, who’s weapons you can grab out of his hands and throw back at him. Stage 2 has a giant plant chase you down a huge bottomless pit, forcing you to evade as it weaves around, and stage 4 has you fighting an octopus deep underwater, who’s tentacles stretch and wave around firing projectiles and generally being a pain to dodge. The final boss sticks you in a blue void, facing off against a demon who summons huge lines of flying enemies who all fly in from around the background, ripe for wracking up huge chains with a well-timed special attack. They’re not exactly the reason I love the game, but Cotton 2 offers some good variety and some nice visual flair with each boss.

As for music, that’s the one area Cotton 2 arguably falls short to the PC Engine version of the original. There’s some good music, but nothing that’ll blow you away, unfortunately. It sets the stage well, there just aren’t any particularly memorable arrangements. It’s a shame, compared to PCE Cotton’s rocking soundtrack that sets the stage well for each of its locations.

I don’t wanna sound like any of this soils the rest of Cotton 2, though! I really like the game, and it’s a lot easier to enjoy casually than most of its contemporaries. It has the kind of experimentation that makes shmups from the Saturn era so fun to play, and the entire Cotton series is packed with a goofy charm that I really love. If you ever play Cotton 2, I recommend giving some of the other games, like Cotton 1 and Panorama Cotton, a look: they’re less approachable than Cotton 2 gameplay-wise, but Cotton as a character is always fun to watch. (Except in Rainbow Cotton.)

In the end, it’s that sense of levity and imagination that makes Cotton 2 not just a fun shmup, but a pretty fantastically magical game.

“So where is Cotton now”, you could ask? Well…