American Box Art Sucks

[Dfskelleton]

I am from England and i can't stand american box art.

Other examples of this are Final Fantasy. The EU and JP box art id just a white case with the logo on it, rather than the mess americans have.

And the worst one i have seen is pretty recent and i know Yahtzee will hate it.

Amnesia.
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/9024/boxartj.jpg

Guess what one belongs to who.

That monster on the cover looks like it has a beak for a mouth.

Oh lord no, no NO!
How could they do that!

Wait... Amnesia has cover art? Well, I can't view the popup. The internet is being an idiot when I try to open it.
EDIT: Nevermind, it works now. WTF? That HAS to be fake. Amnesia is only sold on steam and on Frictional's website. It isn't sold in retail, therefore can have no cover art. It looks like it was made on Deviantart or something.

 

[mikespoff]

Hadn't realised the scale of this problem before, but the contrast in those examples is pretty damn stark...

 

[captainwalrus]

If it's any consolation, PAL box art for SNES games were terri-bad, while the US covers were, for the most part, okay.

Art Lesson #1: Giant, obstrusive borders make for bad box art [http://timewarpgamer.com/features/box_art_disparity_snes.html]

 

[Lord Kloo]

Cover Art is usually irrelevant to buying games as if its on the big display board in shops then its big and you heard about it, if not then you only get to see the side of the box so art is pointless..

Eh? What stores do you go to? Every store I've been to shows the cover not the spine. Some stores like EB Games sometimes have one shelf per console that has only spines showing, but the new releases and so forth are the covers not the spines.

Oh I generally shop in game, gamestation, (uk stores) and the new big releases, or just new things usually have their own sections, but most 'left over' games have only spines showing unless arranging with the first cover towards the corridor, then no-one gets a spine...

I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but I suppose I was making a generalisation based on my experience of medium-sized uk cities..

 

[AmzRigh]

There's one title I really have to bring as another example of what American marketing does with box art. But, due to how obscure the game is, I'm going to approach this a little differently...

The game is Chulip -- a game that can only be described as a "kissing RPG." In the game, you and your father have just moved to a new town. You don't know anybody, and you have to start your life anew. But almost immediately, you meet the girl of your dreams. You want to kiss her, but you're not good enough yet, so you have to go and get better at it...by kissing everyone you possibly can. It was odd, for sure.

I'll start with the cover art it got here in the US:



Now, granted, it does somewhat convey what the game is about. You're trying to kiss everyone. But...they sure don't make it look good. I mean, would you buy that if you didn't know what it was?

In Japan, however, the cover art they got was incredibly different:

[spoiler][img src=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Coverchulip.jpg]

It may not convey the action of the game, but it sure communicates the aloneness the protagonist feels at the outset, as well as illustrating the setting.[/spoiler]

Now, same title notwithstanding, if you saw two games on a shelf, one with the American cover and one with the Japanese...which would you be more interested in?

 

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

Amnesia is sold in retail in some places. That cover is from amazon.

 

[ReiverCorrupter]

The real answer is that America is more consumerist. We expect our products to convey information about the game that we can use to buy it. Collages give you several aspects together, while the minimalist or abstract approach might look better, it doesn't tell you much about gameplay. The main idea behind the American style is to cram in as much information as possible. Let the consumer see the hero and the villain, etc.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

This is one of those things my brain knew about but I somehow never noticed. Now that you've pointed it out, goddamn. Wow. That some bad boxart.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

I love Extra Punctuation, but this was very image heavy and that dampened my love a bit.

Yathzee, you Charismatic Stallion, you!
Next time please rely a bit more on text for humour as usual.

 

[JuryNelson]

The thing about America is that it is fucking huge.

When they brought over the Office, they had to change quite a bit about it before it would be palatable?not to An American Audience, but to an incredibly massive and varied one. Lowest Common Denominator doesn't mean that we're a pack of idiots, it means that we're a nation that's so loosely connected, there's very little that we can all legitimately enjoy.

Design by Committee happens so often here because we usually Enjoy by Committee, too.

That's changing, it should be noted. Inception, Mad Men, Even Kanye West. The vision of a single auteur seen through from beginning to end is coming out more quality, and getting the critical recognition and commercial success we hope for it.

As for why we hate the French, it's partly that we're jealous of their cheap wine and delicious bread, and partly because they take every chance they can to just up and quit working, and that looks too much like laziness to be ignored.

Europe has twice as many people and a dozen times as many languages, and completely different cultures every few hundred miles too. Don't try selling that varied culture crap.

That's a good point, but you're all much closer together than we are. If you don't get a joke, you can shout out your window, "Oi! What they laughin for?" and someone will explain it to you.

If Americans don't get a joke on TV, they just start writing letters.

 

[tzze]

We need big face on box! If there is not big face on the box then we get confused. We say, "WHAT IS THIS IS IT CEREAL." Big face on box tells American brain, "Do not eat! This is heroic journey not breakfast food. You will identify with the massive face and/or breasts on this box and want to become giant head and/or chest for heroic journey adventure. Thank you." Then we understand and are able to place contents of box into correct hole.

 

[twicesliced]

What's even worse is in Canada, we get shitty US cover art twice because they have to include French inserts as well!

Anyway, here's one of my personal favourite offences...

North America:
<img src="http://images.wikia.com/vsrecommendedgames/images/0/0e/Egg.jpg" width=343>

Japan:

 

[AllHailShake]

You know, call me crazy, but it seems to me that we can pretty much trace these issues back to a few select films.

<img src=http://popartuk.parklanecomputing.co.uk/getframe.php?itmSRC=http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgfp1416%2ba-new-hope-original-movie-score-star-wars-episode-iv-poster.jpg&itmWidth=64&itmHeight=90&mouldURL=http://www.popartuk.com/images/framing/repeating/2.jpg&mouldWidth=2.4>

<img src=http://popartuk.parklanecomputing.co.uk/getframe.php?itmSRC=http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgfp1417%2bthe-empire-strikes-back-original-movie-score-star-wars-episode-v-poster.jpg&itmWidth=64&itmHeight=90&mouldURL=http://www.popartuk.com/images/framing/repeating/2.jpg&mouldWidth=2.4>

<img src=http://popartuk.parklanecomputing.co.uk/getframe.php?itmSRC=http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgfp1418%2breturn-of-the-jedi-original-movie-score-star-wars-episode-vi-poster.jpg&itmWidth=64&itmHeight=90&mouldURL=http://www.popartuk.com/images/framing/repeating/2.jpg&mouldWidth=2.4>

 

[cheywoodward]

Please Note: This is all just guesswork.

The most likely explanation that I can think of is a very simple one (at least for the 1980s and 90s cover art). The answer is that the average American gamer of the 80s and 90s was younger than his Japanese and European counterparts. The reason for this is videogame crash of 1983, which was caused by the over-saturation of the videogame market with hundreds of poorly made games. Home console gaming effectively died out and until the NES was released in 1985 new videogames in America were nonexistent. Japan and Europe didn't experience this crash on the same level as America and therefore, while American gamers moved on and found other hobbies, gamers in Japan and Europe kept playing. When combined with the fact that the NES was marketed towards children and not adults the age of the average American gamer was much younger than it was in Japan and Europe. Teenagers would be more attracted to violence and action than a well drawn piece of art that portrays the themes and elements of the game. Therefore publishers ordered the remaking of box art for America in order to make it more "action packed" and "cool" or, in other words, kinda crappy. As for the more recent games, no clue. Maybe we really do just have horrible taste and I just wrote a paragraph for no reason.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

I havent looked at box art in sooo long... And it always seemed normal to me... Maybe we should start shooting and see if we hit the right people

 

[PorkChopXpress]

I've seen some horrid bluray art that came from the UK, so nobody is innocent as far as bad cover art goes.

 

[Deacon Cole]

None of those covers grab my attention. Therefore, they must be for shitty games.

 

[Snotnarok]

Leave it to Yahtzee to talk about a game that I thought no one knew about, Flashback. For someone to bring up that gem in this day and age brings a certain warmth to my heart that someone actually played it. Betting he played aproper version, that wasn't the slow SNES version too.

Anyway, this happened to SO many games, hell Sega was notorious for this with their games, Ecco, Phantasy Star 2 and 4 these games were not only redone but they were redone by Boris Vallejo the famous painter. I'm not making it up, I got the PSIV box right here and there's his bloody signature.

While the art is all well and good, the Japanese version of PSIV has a better cover, it's ..well, more accurate. And to make things more insane, if you open the manual to PSIV it has JAPANESE ANIME style art so what the heck were they thinking?? Heck the game is filled with anime style because the story is told through comicbook cells to tell the story vs sprites.

 

[hyperlasers]

Mass Effect 2. We've all seen the non-American box art, right?

 

[RockPlazaCentral]

I remember thinking that the cover of the instruction booklet of Metroid Prime should have been on the cover of the box instead of Samus just standing there. The instruction booklet cover was much more dynamic.

When I visited Japan in Nov. 2002, I noticed that the Japanese made the choice I preferred.