My favorite advertisements had to be the moutain dew halo tie-in. I hear that it’s back and am doing my best not to go to walmart and buy cases of game fuel.
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What’s that and why do they use the standard Dragon Ball dinosaur/dragon template on it?
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Dragon quest? Its a long running jrpg series by Enix, now Square enix. It was published in america as Dragon Warriors until 2005, and akira toriyama, the main guy behind Dragon Ball and all that did the art for most of the series.
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If Toriyama did the art, well, that explains it. And while I have heard about DQ, never been even close to playing one myself.
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Ive only played like 2 of them and only finished one. 9 on the ps2
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XI is good, but the only one I’ve played. It does a decent job of pulling off a very old school JRPG style and providing enough quality of life features that it doesn’t feel all that dated.
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Surprised no one has posted these masterpieces yet
Why is Mega Man shooting that poor robot in the Johnson?
Is that a chrome covered, disemboweled cat head in the background?
The best video game cover ever, hands down!
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LOL I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen the MM2 cover. That is hideous.
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MM2 screams weird 60-70’s low budget sci-fi movie and i kind of love it for that. But its definitely not good looking lol.
MM3 feels like a saturday morning cartoon, i swear thats castle greyskull in the distance…
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Did some digging…found some real doozies.
First we got Ninjas… Ninja Golf on the atari 7800… the golf ball and tee bandolier is a nice touch.
Followed by Ninja Scooter Sim? Excuse me what?
Then possibly one of the greatest covers ever with Saboteur 2. The first one also offered a ninja using an uzi while dropkicking someone or something so i guess they had to one up that
Then this weirdly cursed Bust a Move 2 america cover where the publisher decided it had to be a horror game about peoples souls trapped in bubbles…perhaps
Ghost Lion… a kemco clone of Dragon Quest… i got nothing
This weird japanese game called Ringside Angels. The girl is Cutie Suzuki who is an actual well known wrestler, but that background is uh… something
And finally Dynowarz which seems to be about Robo-cop visiting jurassic park on vacation… i just like dinosaurs tho
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As usual the west had it worse than Japan:
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I have no words for this:
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Shoot, i missed that one during my guitar hero series. Shame on me 
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I remember the western MM3 being fine, 1 is…whatever the hell it is (in a sweatsuit with some armor? And a normal gun? the minute you plug the game in you know it’s wrong!), but 2 is just… it’s like one of those “what if ___ were real?” memes.
I wonder what it was that we always had to change the covers for releases. Did they think ugly realism > anime? Was it anti-Japanese? I became a JRPG and anime fan, so I had an attachment to the imagery more than others perhaps, but never once throughout my childhood did I think the English covers looked good. Mega Mans, Phantasy Star 4 like I mentioned above, even Final Fantasy, which have mostly kept it simple, have cooler JP covers in the early years.
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Yes actually, since there was a strong stigma against anime in the 80s and early 90s. (It still exists today of course, but it used to be much worse.) I’d say it was the late 90s when anime started getting accepted somewhat in the mainstream, at which point it gradually started to become less common to completely scrub away any Japanese elements (be it traditional or pop culture) from international releases of games.
In the late 90s to early 00s, Pokemon became a worldwide phenomenon for kids, and (in the US at least) cartoon programming blocks like Toonami and Adult Swim turned lots of teens into fans of Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, and so on. I’d also note Final Fantasy 7’s release in 1997 as the turning point for JRPGs being accepted by mainstream gamers—and that was a game that had notably anime-looking characters.
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Aside from your point about games and anime aesthetic I will say that anime was always part of the western animation diet, they just didn’t specifically label it and some of it was Japanese studios animating non-Japanese stories (Belle & Sebastian, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). But my entire childhood was full of 70s and 80s anime. I just didn’t know it had a term until the late 80s and early 90s when I started going to comic shops and seeing import anime and watching things like Akira for the first time. By the time Sailor Moon showed up on TV and was labelled anime it felt like a completely new generation of anime to me (which it was).
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I think most cartoons that were considered American were actually animated by Japanese studios. I know Real Ghostbusters was animated by DIC’s Japanese arm (so I guess still an American company, albeit with Japanese animators).
While I’ve enjoyed some anime (admittedly the more “mainstream” ones; Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Castlevania, Perfect Blue) I find it a really hard genre to get into. I’m not a huge fan of the style for the most part and the voice acting - both English or Japanese - feels so forced. Also, many of the fans really put me off (although being a big comic book fan I probably don’t have the right to say that 
)
Back on topic, I actually really like the following cover. Feels very classy and pin-up-y. I also have something of a morbid curiosity to play it.
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I picked up Final Fantasy XVI the other day and noticed you can reverse the cover sleeve to show the Japanese box art, which is leagues better imo. Here they are for comparison:
First the NA/EU cover, which seems kind of like a generic movie poster to me. I like it, but it’s not amazing.
And then the JP cover, which gives me more of a DMC vibe and I like that better.
EDIT: I forgot about the deluxe edition art, which is simpler but I think my favorite of the bunch.
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I love when games have flip cover sleeves. A lot of ps4/5 games seem to have em and nearly every switch game but xbox seems to rarely have them.
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