why do american covers for games usually suck compared to the Japanese (and some PAL)

[luffy4]

as well as why do they have to change it anyway?

like megaman Legends 1-2 Japans cover kick ass and ours sucks

[Iamerror]

Maybe they think that it won't appeal to american gamers? I not sure why, but it is something to wonder about.

[MaslowK]

Because the japanese are a highly superior race and therefore make much superior art compared to us inferior white people, duh.

Seriously though, in some cases I'd just assume different artists end up doing the cover art for the US/PAL and JP releases of games.



vs



If not for having the same title on the cover I would assume they were two different games the main characters on them look nothing alike.

[Sheik]

Yeah they do, they have pointed ears

But on topic, sometimes (like in Sonic CD) it's to showcase sound capabilities, other times.........
well lets just say that Megaman 8 did well (IMO) with the US cover of its' opening.

(oops) Those are responses for sound covers

[deadlegion]

When it comes to localisation I think covers are probably the last on the list of "issues".
Shitty American voices and different title names (Project Zero/Fatal Frame series is an example) are the bigger problems
If you really want, you could dl an alternative hq cover and print it (if it's available).

[luffy4]

yeah "biohazard" to Resident Evil kinda dumb, but i would rather my game sound dumb than look it, as for Voices that one wii game had comically awful voices, same with House of the Dead II

[Ragnar]

A lot of older games were localized without ANY support from the original developers. This means no art assets and such. And if you wanted to remove the foreign text from a cover before photoshop became common, it was a lot easier to recreate assets from scratch. And localizations by their very nature are way lower budget than the original development, so it's natural the production quality isn't quite at the same level.

Although, I prefer a couple US boxes over Japanese boxes. Dragon Warrior over Dragon Quest for instance:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/563408-d...warrior/images
Same damn picture, but some dude put a lot more work into that than Toriyama did

[[toj.cc]Phantom]

A lot of older games were localized without ANY support from the original developers. This means no art assets and such. And if you wanted to remove the foreign text from a cover before photoshop became common, it was a lot easier to recreate assets from scratch. And localizations by their very nature are way lower budget than the original development, so it's natural the production quality isn't quite at the same level.

Although, I prefer a couple US boxes over Japanese boxes. Dragon Warrior over Dragon Quest for instance:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/563408-d...warrior/images
Same damn picture, but some dude put a lot more work into that than Toriyama did

I'm a huge fan of Toriyama's art so I'll have to disagree with you there. However I hate the Japanese voices in DBZ and DBZ games, for some reason they sound so girly compared to most Japanese dubs.

[skullpoker]

I think a lot of it comes from aesthetics. Using the Landstalker covers as an example, we see that the JP version uses a much darker tone, with the Hero, the leader of the Villains, and a female character. This shows that cartoons are more than 'kids stuff' in Japan. Another example is the sword. Note in the JP cover, his sword is similar to a stylized Katana, with a definite bend, swept across to indicate motion.

In the US cover, we see much lighter colors, speaking to cartoons and video games being something for kids. Happy and bright, in spite of the murderous psychopath and skeleton. We also see much more of the imagery we'd expect to see in the game, with the huge lock on the door. It seems the US cover is less a piece of art, and more a summary of the games' content. Also, the sword is straight, in a more Western style, with a bright aura indicating magical powers.

[Elin]

Like Ragnar said, in the 80s and early 90s, it was mostly down to extremely poor communication between the head offices in Japan and localisation houses abroad, and a dearth of really good image editing software. It's no coincidence that as publishers have started to work more closely with the original developers and technology has moved on, you've by and large seen a move away from the old trend of drawing up a completely new cover in a style which in no way meshes with the in game graphics. They actually have the ability to not have to do that now, and any changes tend to at least incorporate the original art assets.

There was also the fact that in the early 90s, many publishers thought that Japanese art styles wouldn't catch the eye on Western shelves, especially for titles aimed at a slightly older audience. As the Western fanbase for anime and manga has expanded and there has been a move away from the prejudice against cartoons as being "just for kids", I think publishers are less reluctant to put out a game with Japanese art on the cover. Heck in many cases, I think it actually nets you sales. I'm pretty sure niche games from companies like Gust and Nippon Ichi will have sold a good few extra copies to anime fans based solely on their cover art.

As for more recent and less easily justifiable changes, like SquEnix USA's tendency to plaster characters all over the covers of Final Fantasy games instead of retaining the much classier logos against white backdrops of their Japanese and PAL counterparts... Your guess is as good as mine. Just different advertising strategies, I guess? There seems to often be a tendency in the US to want a flashy background and some sort of character or indication of a game's gameplay on the cover, while in Japan and here in Europe, minimalism often wins the day. A generalisation, of course, but one which companies often seem to follow.

Regarding bad dubs of Japanese stuff, I've said it before and I'll say it again: learn Japanese and join the import gaming master race.

different title names (Project Zero/Fatal Frame series is an example)

To be fair, crap title changes are not unique to America. Learn Japanese, and you'll soon discover that they're just as guilty of messing with titles of American things. In fact, there are probably far more bad title changes into Japanese than out of it. Here are a few from a quick glance through Amazon JP:

Groundhog Day > Love in Deja Vu
Ferris Bueller's Day Off > One Morning, Ferris Suddenly...
The Shawshank Redemption > In the Skies of Shawshank
Dead Poets Society > Live in the Now
Finding Forrester > If You Should Find a Writer
As Good as it Gets > The Romance Writer
Primal Fear > Where the Truth Is
Before Sunrise > Before Sunrise: The Distance to Your Lover
Dr. Strangelove > The Doctor's Strange Love (I'm guessing the translator here didn't get that Dr. Strangelove was... uh... actually the name of a character in the movie... :'D)

Granted, those are translations to English, and some sound better in Japanese, but they're all still pretty pants. :'D

[deadlegion]

To be fair, crap title changes are not unique to America. Learn Japanese, and you'll soon discover that they're just as guilty of messing with titles of American things. In fact, there are probably far more bad title changes into Japanese than out of it. Here are a few from a quick glance through Amazon JP:

Groundhog Day > Love in Deja Vu
Ferris Bueller's Day Off > One Morning, Ferris Suddenly...
The Shawshank Redemption > In the Skies of Shawshank
Dead Poets Society > Live in the Now
Finding Forrester > If You Should Find a Writer
As Good as it Gets > The Romance Writer
Primal Fear > Where the Truth Is
Before Sunrise > Before Sunrise: The Distance to Your Lover
Dr. Strangelove > The Doctor's Strange Love (I'm guessing the translator here didn't get that Dr. Strangelove was... uh... actually the name of a character in the movie... :'D)

Granted, those are translations to English, and some sound better in Japanese, but they're all still pretty pants. :'D

I completely understand what you're saying about stuff being mutilated when translated (or attempted translation).
It happens quite a bit between various languages.
Even though my German is pretty terrible, I still manage to notice translation anomalies with movie subtitles (English).

I was talking about game titles like Project Zero/Fatal Frame.
And Jack Spicer mentioned Biohazard.

I don't understand Japanese at all, but I always thought games like this had their titles changed for no reason I can fathom

I only mentioned this (and bad voice dubs) because imo you could change a cover yourself if it really bothered you. But changing the in-game title and voices may not always be so straight forward (although there are plenty of undubs, and some international releases with English subs).

[Mr. Nemo]

I figure it's because you prefer anime over semi-realistic art. Most of the JP to U.S. aren't that kind of, "OMG, they made a terrible mistake!" It's only the cheap dump runs of games that usually get the bad choice of art. I took a gander at the Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 and prefer the U.S. versions because it actually had up close detail of what a real Mega Man would look like. With it being the Playstation, I figured they finally were able to make him in his full glory. The JP version looks like every other Mega Man game art.

[Cookie Monster]

Terrible american covers for games?

Ico NTSC cover goes here.

[gezegond]

I wanted to mention new FF covers, but Elin already did. So I'll go ahead and point out to Saturn games instead. All of them. They all have artistic JP covers, but US ones are just generic box art.

[Elin]

I was talking about game titles like Project Zero/Fatal Frame.
And Jack Spicer mentioned Biohazard.

I don't understand Japanese at all, but I always thought games like this had their titles changed for no reason I can fathom

I always thought Biohazard to Resident Evil was quite a good one myself. Resident Evil might be a little silly sounding, but it's also rather unique, and easily one of the most memorable videogame titles out there for me. In contrast, Biohazard, while cool to a Japanese person, just sounds fairly bland and ordinary to me as a native English speaker. I don't really think a game with a title like that would catch my eye at all, so I can see why they changed it, even if I'm not generally a fan of name changes either. Different strokes for different folks, I guess~

As for Fatal Frame, it's a tricky one. I agree it's a crap title, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how they translated the Japanese title, they would have been losing some meaning. In Japanese, the series is called Zero. But the title is intentionally written using a single kanji with that meaning instead of the much more common transliteration of the English word into katakana script or use of the number. Why? Well... because of this, basically:

rei2.jpg

Screenshot'd a text document in case you don't have Japanese text support. As you can see, the kanji in the title looks very similar to the one for ghost, and unless you told a Japanese speaker that the title was read "Zero", they'd probably even pronounce it the same. Which is fitting being that... er... it's a game about ghosts. :'D In short, the Japanese title was chosen largely based on a pun that doesn't translate unless you have a knowledge of kanji characters. And in light of that, I think they figured leaving it as it was was rather meaningless. Personally I still would have just gone with Zero, or even Project Zero as it's called in PAL territories, as I think both titles are kinda cool in and of themselves. But the name change in that particular case was far from just an arbitrary choice.

I don't know. I used to be really down on English game translations too. Then I started learning Japanese and doing some translation myself. And the more I did and the more I learned, the more I came to sympathise with professional translators and understand the logic behind some of their seemingly meaningless decisions. Don't get me wrong, there are some terrible localisations out there, but I think more often than not, professional game localisation houses are far, far better than many people give them credit for. It's just that a lot of the time, people don't really understand the reasons behind the changes that they're getting up in arms over.

So I'll go ahead and point out to Saturn games instead. All of them. They all have artistic JP covers, but US ones are just generic box art.

A particularly egregious example being Panzer Dragoon. From beautiful hand drawn artwork to HAI GAIZ CHECK OUT MY 3D GRAFIX.