You know how it is with classic shooters... The story is either about some space fighter pilot in the year 3160, and you're humanity's last hope against the alien fleet. OR. The story is like the one in Cotton, which has you play as a young witch girl who really wants some candy, and is willing to massacre the thousand or so cute monster creatures that happen to get in her way. With that in mind, I highly recommend playing this game with the English fan translation patch! This prologue cut scenes for this one are hilarious.

Unlike most of the other Cotton games, this isn't a 2D horizontal side-scrolling shoot-em-up. Instead this is basically another take on Space Harrier, a sort of 3D-looking forward-scrolling shooter (I guess you could call it a rail shooter, but you're just going straight). The first thing that will catch your attention in this game are the amazing graphics. I can hardly believe this is running on regular old Mega Drive power -- no CD or 32X attachments here. Hell, if you told me it was a Saturn game, I would've believed that more readily. Panorama Cotton has gorgeous sprite art though, and the sheer amount of stuff flying by on the screen at any time is breathtaking. And all without any significant slowdown. There are moments, but overall the game never seemed to strain itself. Some of the most vibrant colors you'll see in a 16-bit game, and the sprite-based 3D tunnel effect holds up much better than early 3D wire-frame/polygon efforts.

The gameplay itself here is solid too. It takes some time to get used to controlling Cotton on her broom, and it perhaps takes a little more time to get a feel for aiming her shots against enemies. With enough practice I got the hang of it though, and found the game overall to be a lot of fun. At the very least, it was a unique sort of challenge, and I really liked playing levels over for the chance to try going up or down at certain points to experience new branching paths. I also really appreciated how levels would change environments at a rather steady clip, so I never got bored with repeating backgrounds or enemies. The bosses were also great, and generally felt like just the right level of challenge.

The game lets you choose your speed of flight, curiously enough. I pretty much always stuck with the lowest setting, because even the slowest speed is still pretty fast. But if there are segments you wish to blast through, that interesting option is there to play around with. You also can collect gems to power up your special attacks -- it's rather tricky to collect gems in this game though, and tbh I never fully figured out the leveling up system for specials. I'm sure it's all in the manual... >____>

Bottom line is I think this is a rather special game for the Genesis/Mega Drive that everyone ought to give a shot, but at the same time I can understand if this won't click with a lot of people. The barrier of entry is a bit steeper than the more common horizontal and vertical shooters of the era -- and, well, it is very silly and cutesy and 90s anime-ey, and that won't be for everyone.