Final Fantasy VI is one of my favorite games of all time and undoubtedly my favorite Final Fantasy game. This release is interesting as this is the first time in the US that the game is being released, by itself, as Final Fantasy VI. The original SNES release was known as Final Fantasy III since the true FF's II, III and V were never released here originally and IV was released as FFII. As a result we get something we've never had before : Final Fantasy VI box art!
I've got to give SquareEnix credit for not ruining the box art of the SNES ports as the US releases have arguably been superior or at least equally as good as the Japanese releases. This is usually not the case with FF games.
In fact the only thing really bringing the US box art down is the obnoxious Game Boy Advance logo Nintendo of America slaps on every GBA box which squeezes the art space down to nothing. Japanese GBA games come in awesome little thin boxes without any such distractions. I prefer the art on the US version a little bit but both covers are nice. You really can't go wrong with Yoshitaka Amano artwork and usually the only Amano artwork seen on US covers is each games unique logo, which is always designed by Amano.
Much like GBA games, the boxes for Japanese Super Famicom games weren't straddled with a silly design template, as SNES games were, allowing the art to fill the entire cover. There is simply no contest here. Hell, just the little Super Famicom logo is better than anything on the US boxart.
First of all, as this was the last US Fantasy to be numbered incorrectly it still used the sword logo rather than the Japanese logo featuring Terra(Tina in Japan) in the Magitek armor, easily my favorite logo in the series.
Secondly, the Japanese art is nothing short of breathtaking, truly giving the impression of an epic fantasy world. The US box is a slapped together Photoshop job which tied into the magazine ad campaign for the game which featured Mog (in that exact pose) against a variety of monsters.
That said, Final Fantasy III was still a vast improvement over Final Fantasy II's "logo on a red background" box art.
Next up are the Japanese and European PSX re-releases of Final Fantasy VI. This was actually the first time VI was officially released in Europe as it was passed over for release on SNES because of translation issues.
You can begin to see a trend with Japanese boxes not followed by the rest of the world: they don't like unnecessary junk on their boxes. A simple PS logo in the upper corner is sufficient to denote this a PlayStation game. The European version adopted the format of all the Japanese Final Fantasy titles after VI: the logo on a simple white background. I've always liked that format as the unique logo's are sufficient box art in and of themselves. For the Japanese re-release however, Square opted to reuse the art from the cover of the SFC version and it works just as well here. I still prefer the original SFC cover as it looks nicer filling the entire box rather than having the logo on a white field at the bottom.
Below is the US artwork for Final Fantasy Anthology for PSX, the US version of which featured FFV and VI (the European version contained FFIV and V since VI was released separately).
This was I believe the first time Amano's art had appeared on a US Final Fantasy cover and set the trend for future re-releases to feature his art on the cover as can be seen on Final Fantasy Chronicles (FFIV and Chrono Trigger), and Final Fantasy Origins (FF I &II) as well as the GBA ports.
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