Opinion : Japanese game box art is better than that in the West

Over the last few weeks during my retrogaming sessions I’ve noticed a lot of Japanese game box art, in particular for GameBoy Advance and it strikes me that for some reason box art for Japanese games seems to be more creative and dramatic than those in Europe and North America, I mean take a look at the Japanese box art (above) for Pokemon Sapphire and Fire Red on GameBoy Advance, just beautiful, compare that with the European versions and they just don’t come close.  Could this be simply down to a flair for Japanese creativity or just laziness on the part of Nintendo Europe and Nintendo of America?  Whatever the reason I think the above examples look stunning as do the designs for the rest of the GameBoy Advance Pokemon games - do a search on Google Images and you’ll see what I mean.  There are many more fantastic examples across the different machines, the SNES has some stunning box art as does the PC Engine, it just seems a shame to me that more of an effort hasn’t been made for game releases in Europe and North America.

 

If you’re interested in finding out more Bitmap Books (http://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk) are offering two superb books - Super Famicom : The Box Art Collection and GameBoy : The Box Art Collection, both look like highly interesting reads and I definitely plan on purchasing both books sometime.