White Knight Story Art

Kotaku's Luke Plunkett is a man after my own heart, getting excited over newly released concept art for Level 5's upcoming PS3 RPG, White Knight Story. I've never gotten excited over screenshots of games even back in the days when video wasn't prevalent on the intertrons, and nowadays, hell if I've seen a video I've seen a shit ton of screenshots as far as I'm concerned. Actual art though, now that's what warms the cockles of my heart. The bread and butter of good box art is good concept art (character designs in particular) so this sort of thing is fair game here on Game.Box.Art.

The game itself looks pretty damn sweet and if you haven't seen the trailer yet, do it now, I'll be here when you get back.

Not bad, right? That's another game to add to your list of drool-worthy PS3 games that MAY come out in the US in 2008. Sony actually was pushing Level 5 to get the game out for launch but the developer thankfully told Sony (who is ponying up the dough for the game which will therefore be PS3 exclusive) to go to hell as they don't plan on compromising their vision for the game....

A vision which apparently includes giant eight-legged city-bearing uber-turtles, of which I am a huge fan. That dude in the image isn't even concerned; Wanderer from Shadow of the Colossus has nothing on this guy.

I think the entire world seen in Shadow of the Colossus could actually fit on that turtle's back.

Note to Level-5: I will be tremendously disappointed if I don't get to climb that turtle.

Source: Gallery: Gorgeous White Knight Concept Art - Kotaku

Mass Effect cover revealed.

There's still no release date but "final" box art is a good indication that the game may actually see release before the summer.

I'm not thrilled with the design, it screams "Bad Sci-Fi Novel". In particular, the focus on the "main character" is kind of silly as the game let's you choose how the main character looks and even whether it's a man or woman. So just slapping some generic dude on there, flanked by two much more interesting characters, is not ideal. It would make a world of difference to at least give the guy some personality. It looks like they just photo-shopped in a character design that was probably used internally to demonstrate what the character looked like in that armor. The female on the right is in essentially the same position.

I'll be interested to see what this game's cover looks like when it hits Japan as they don't tend to use covers which are just mish mashes of pre-existing artwork.

And I've never been a fan of the logo, it's way too plain.

Final Fantasy VI through the years...

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.

Chulip: Gamestop Exclusive

When I wrote my post on Chulip the other day no retailers even had a listing for it, which was kind of concerning for a game supposed to be coming out in a month. Since then Gamestop once again had the game listed on its website, this time with a message declaring it to be exclusive to its video game retail empire.

Unlike Gamestop's last exclusive title, Tenchu DS, Chulip should at the very least be playable and has a good chance of becoming quite rare as retailer exclusivity usually means a pretty small print run.

This is one you might actually want to pre-order as most stores will likely only get a couple of copies, if any at all.

Bullet Witch: US vs Japan cover

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BulletWitch is another game I've been keeping an eye on for some time, primarily because of the excellent design of said Witch and her giant Broom Gun. The game got decent reviews in Japan, but Atari, who is publishing it here in the US, is supposedly fixing up some of the problems with the game before it hits in late February, namely the camera control and targeting.

As far as the box art goes, Atari stayed pretty close to the original design, zooming out from Alicia a bit (which let's you see some more of the intricate design on her gun) and shifting the logo to the top of the box to make it easier to spot on store shelves which often block the lower half of a box.

I'm not sure why they felt the need to change the cold blue cityscape background to some sort of fiery hell but I suppose the brighter color makes it stand out more. I definitely prefer the Japanese cover, perhaps because I have a thing for giant celestial objects. When it comes down to a Gigantic Moon or a Fiery Maelstrom I'm gonna pick the moon every time. Oddly enough, the Japanese cover of Chulip, my previous entry, has a giant Sun on the cover.

Anyway, the good news is that Jeremiah Cohn, the Product Manager on the title, posted on his blog that they are planning to include the original Japanese cover on the flipside of the insert, which is what all publishers should be doing when they bring Japanese titles over and mangle the cover art.

Ironically, BulletWitch's US cover art is pretty good so an alternate cover isn't as sorely needed as for let's say, any of the US Resident Evil covers, which are completely different and much cooler in both Europe and Japan and are usually exclusive to each market. But that's another post...

Chulip: US vs. Japan Box Art

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I've been waiting for something worth commenting on for my first post and it took exactly one week for this to pop up. Chulip is a game I've been looking forward to for awhile and a US release (courtesy of the fine folks at Natsume) has been in the works for ages. It's been so long since it was supposed to be out that I had assumed it just got cancelled like the equally odd Giftpia. The premise of the game is not your typical fare: You're out to kiss a particular girl but to do so you need to increase your reputation. To do that you need to try and get a kiss from EVERYONE in the game, most of whom have no desire to be kissed, least of all by you.

It's truly the type of game only the Japanese could produce.

Along with the news of the game's impending February 2007 release date comes the first glimpse of the US box art, which features the in-game character models rather than the beautiful hand drawn art of its Japanese counterpart.

The game has been out in Japan for over 4 years now and I've always admired this box art. It ranks up there with the European/Japanese ICO cover as one of my favorites. Unfortunately, hand drawn cover art may as well be outlawed in the US as you'll almost never see it survive in tact on our shores.

The US cover (on the left) isn't really all that bad however, and you can't really blame Natsume for changing it as the Japanese cover doesn't say much about the game outside of "Hey, check out how pretty my cover is!". The kissing concept is expressed in the new cover while also showcasing a variety of the game's unique characters.

I still prefer the Japanese cover but you've gotta give Natsume credit for bringing this one over at all (even if it is four years late!) What would be cool is if they printed the original Japanese cover on the backside of the insert as some publishers have been known to do.