American VS Japanese Video Game Box Art

Today I wanted to talk about Game Box Arts.

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[mkthemc]

90's American box art has that flashy in your face look with those dark blues and super exaggerated facial expressions while Japanese box art has that subtle feel with the soft whites and toned down facial expressions. Quite a contrast in style back then.

[superfandesonic]

I always loved the Japanese cover arts! The sonic ones were so flashy and the kirby ones so cute!!

[ShirubaGin]

That transition from Crash to Yakuza was smooth.

[mwelite]

I’ve read that the differences in box art is because in America, cute styled things are for kids. While in japan cuteness is just an art style. Hence Kirby frowning. It’s to make him look less kiddy. Also why Crash was changed so much.

[ShadowXeldron]

To be fair on Sonic Spinball, it was developed my the American team at STI (this is shown by the SatAM characters in the bonus stages and Sonic resembling the Greg Martin design more than the original Sonic 1 appearance. It also "treats" your ears to audio produced with the GEMS sound driver, which was popular with US devs and is the source of truly the compositions ever produced), so it makes sense that it would come out in America and Europe before Japan. Japan still has the better boxart though, so that's the one I use for Spinball in my Steam library (with the exception of the Game Gear version, since the Greg Martin artwork just seems more "Game Gear" to me).

[jaccblacc]

Another think about Yakuza is the name, in Japan it's called "Ryu Ga Gotoku" which translates to "Like a Dragon", the name would late be the subtitle of Yakuza 7 and now with the 8th game, it seems like Yakuza is no longer called Yakuza but rather the original Japanese name "Like a Dragon".

[randomistough]

0:33 I mean Megaman still looks really impressive for the NES.

[Vailskibum]

Your editing style has been improving 👀

[Cp-]

Japan: Cute
US: Edgy
Europe: Everything goes

[bFst]

Interesting to note when it comes to different box art for video games. The covers for the first "Ape Escape" game in Japan, America and Europe were also quite different as well.

[nigralurker]

2:40 Kid Icarus isn't displaying anger, he's showing focus and concentration, which if you ever watched someone prepare to fire a bow, they're completely concentrated on firing at their target.

[iscopeeee]

Hell yeah, Crash mention! The sometimes arbitrary changes they made to the series in Japan has always been so fascinating to me :0

[miragebangbravern]

The reason why Kirby had a more meaner look in the US cover art is to make him look fiercer because Japanese devs think that the muricans prefer their playable video game protagonists to be aggressive, you can see this with the Crash Bandicoot cover arts too.

In fact, there even exist an official US ad of Kirby being depicted as a criminal complete with inmate facial hair so....yeah....you get the idea now.

[DrRobotnikPingas]

1:03 Dr Wily looks like, he just invented the atom bomb

[lamiamekni]

7:02 when I saw the cover for the first time, I was like "Sonic looks HD" before I realized that HD didn't exist in the 90s

[themissingbits]

American Sonic: Oh look how 90s cool he is, He(s) so cool!
American Kirby: Oh look how cute he is, But where is the Colors
American Mega Man:

[jenniferpinel]

I'm actually writing my thesis on this subject, so this video was very interesting and very informative. Thank you!

[ProZach]

man i thought this was a 1 mil channel and i was shocked that it was only 21K? after i watched this i went and watched like half of your videos and i gotta say man you are great! you are videos are amazing and the presentation is really good i love your content man keep on doing videos id like to see you a youtube star one day stay awesome!

[NerdKirby]

Yooo, Kirby mentioned!

Box art is always very interesting anyways!

[CaptBlock]

8:00 you could say, a new frontier
I'll see myself out