The Best and Worst of Video Game Box Art

[Zkuq]

SanAndreasX said:

Zkuq said:

It was the same in Europe until XIII, which took a turn to a less minimalistic direction, and finally XV threw it out of the window entirely. I think X has my favourite box art of the series due to its colours and the balanced size of the imagery. XII already had quite large imagery. VI is another one whose art I personally like, probably due to the selected colours, but objectively I'd say it's worse that X's.

Anyway, here's X's European box art:

In the US, it was the opposite for the SNES games.

These were very minimalst. I suppose Square USA didn't want to spend a lot of money printing them, plus there was also the American aversion to anything that looked "foreign." Square USA actually tried to play up Mog as a mascot for FFIII (FF6). The US TV commercial was done in claymation and featured Mog holding "auditions" for monsters only to zap them with lightning.

In Japan, the Famicom FF1-3 featured Amano artwork. FF4-5 on the SFC, however, featured renditions of the chibi sprites for some reason.

FF6 once again got a full Amano illustration in Japan, similar to the FC games.

That's an interesting history splash, so thanks! Also, those Japanese box arts you posted are pretty cool, even if they're not as minimalistic as during the PS1 and PS2 days. Those American box arts you posted though... I've always hated them, ugh. Not classy at all! At least the one for 'III' has something going on, but the one for 'II' looks really cheap. Somehow they've done minimastic both correctly and poorly along the years.