Märchen Adventure Cotton 100% Review

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Fast Facts

Märchen Adventure Cotton 100% tells the story of Nata de Cotton who comes across Silk, a fairy who’s looking for help as the world fell into darkness. At first, our little heroine is uninterested in helping the fairy in need until Silk tells her that giant Willows, Cotton’s favourite candy, is waiting for her at the other end of the darkness. Without hesitation, Cotton changes her tune and she sets out along Silk to find the cause of the darkness.

Cotton 100% is a 2D horizontal shoot’em up, or shmup, where players, playing as Cotton on her flying broom, navigate levels from start to finish killing every possible thing in sight and avoiding enemy projectiles in order to survive. As with any shmup, you will pick up power-ups that will help you survive and navigate the treacherous levels.

The most interesting feature here is that the game has a light RPG mechanic to it which also ties into your character health. As you kill enemies, they will drop gems that you need to pick up in order to fill up your XP meter. However, taking damage lowers it; once you’ve reached 0, you lost a life. I find it pretty fun as it adds a layer of challenge.

For hardcore and newcomers alike!

Given that Cotton 100% is a re-release of a 1994 Super Famicom game, there are a few little quality of life improvements made to it. You can make use of save states; much like with emulators. This will allow you to manually restart at the last spot you manually saved instead of going back to the beginning. When starting you can choose between Standard mode, which is a bit more forgiving thanks to the aforementioned save states, Rewind, and Cheats. Or if you’re up for a challenge, you can play the Challenge mode; which will unlock cheats for Standard mode as you progress through.

As a whole, Cotton 100% doesn’t have many faults or problems with it. The main thing that needs to be addressed is the same thing that afflicts any other shmup: repetition. If you don’t use any of the perks and try to get through it “normally”, then you will die and game over, meaning that you’ll need to start from scratch. You need to remember enemy patterns and practice in order to get better and make it further.

Taking a trip back to the 90s

Given that the game dates from 1992, don’t expect it to impress you visually. However, the visuals have aged pretty well given that we’re seeing more 2D 8/16-bit platformers releasing. It has its unique and colourful charm. The soundtrack is also pretty solid. Given that the chips used for Super NES/Famicom games have generated a lot of classic and timeless soundtracks, it sounds great and intact; as if you’d imagine yourself going back (or if you’re too young, trying to imagine what life was like in 1992) in time.

Märchen Adventure Cotton 100% is definitely one of the most fun and addictive shmups (re)released over the last few years. While maintaining the challenging factor, it feels approachable enough for newcomers to give it a chance given its more forgiving mechanics such as not dying with one hit. The presentation might be dated for younger gamers, but this cute little shmup shouldn’t be slept on.

Märchen Adventure Cotton 100% can be purchased on the Nintendo Switch’s eShop.