Artistic Showdown: The Battle of the Box Covers

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Box Art Brawl!

Last time, we examined the Wii classic Okami in light of the original sequel announcement from The Game Awards (hooray!). To be honest, it wasn’t a particularly close contest: Japan’s stunning use of color and design took the win with 74% of the vote, while North America/Europe managed to grab the remaining 26%.

This week, we’re going back even further to the era of the SNES with the delightful Breath of Fire II. Originally released in 1994 by Capcom, it has since been made available on GBA, the Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, and of course, Nintendo Switch Online.

It’s another showdown this week, with North America and Europe teaming up against Japan. So enough chit-chat, let’s get into it.

Be sure to cast your votes in the poll below; but first, let’s take a look at the cover art designs themselves.

Europe / North America

We appreciate the color usage in both regional variations here, and the Western design heavily incorporates shadows with its character lineup; it’s pretty cool. That said, the change in art style leads to a loss of some of the key elements from the original Japanese design. It’s not a bad look by any means, but we think its performance this week will largely depend on your personal preferences.

Japan

The colors here are a bit cooler than the Western version overall, but there’s a nice blend in there too. The deep crimson of the dragon, along with the pops of yellow and green in the characters’ outfits; it’s lovely! However, it does suffer from a common issue that movie posters tend to have at this period: it just crams a lot of characters onto the canvas without much thought. Still, we have to admit that it works quite well here.

Thank you for voting! We’ll see you next time for another installment of Box Art Brawl.