Bad box arts

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I'm sorry but ever since they first showed this, I always found it stupid. Why is Claude upside-down
 
hmm i wouldn't say i can think of any outright terrible box arts, but i guess bowser's inside story's is kinda bland especially when compared to how great the game is
 
Usually, Pokémon boxart is great. They always have good boxes when it comes to Nintendo Consoles. But put them on the Sega Pico Beena, and you get this boxart.

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If you never heard of the Beena, basically it's a successor to the Pico that was only released in Japan, and had several officially licensed Pokémon games on it during generations 3, 4, and 5. However, Pokémon Diamond & Pearl: Search for Pokémon! Adventure in the Maze's boxart is just way too cluttered with them. A few of them is nice, but this box has 30-40 Pokémon taking over all of the space, leaving very little room for anything else. Talk about laziness.
 
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Easily the worst PAC-MAN box art, by miles.
 
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I know I'm cheating since this was bad on purpose but I never pass up an excuse to show the Phalanx box art.

It's...an interesting way to try to differentiate themselves from all the other space shooters in the market that's for sure.
 
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I mean, disregard the creepy, low-budget bootleggy looking character models, the title in of itself is very difficult to read.
 
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Left: North America.
Right: Europe.

I feel like Europe got the short end of the stick when it came to the Zero series' boxart.
 
Basically most of the NES and virtually all of the SMS library. Aside from that I came to post Bust-A-Move, but of course that was posted, so:

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It's just too random and unappealing to the target demographic. I know they were trying to be random but still, could've done better even with that angle.
 
You know, I totally get why people continue to make fun of the North American box arts for Mega Man (and to a lesser extent Mega Man 2), but I think some of the later original series North American box arts are still pretty bad.

Take Mega Man 3 here for example:
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Like yeah you're no longer trying to make him look like some adult, but I really don't care for that whole early 90s thing with games with anime-style box art where they'd redraw it for the North American (and sometimes European) releases and give it a similar style but made more 'realistic' in terms of details and shading. Just looks weird and wrong to me.
 
Want some bad boxes from our favourite marsupial?

latest


Here's N-Tranced's pal box. It's just Crash on a cyan background with his mouth open. It seems that once again, the Europeans simply don't care. Just look at what the Americans got.

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It doesn't even compare to this. How did the one above this one even pass? I swear, the euros have no sense of quality control at all.
 
Want some bad boxes from our favourite marsupial?

latest


Here's N-Tranced's pal box. It's just Crash on a cyan background with his mouth open. It seems that once again, the Europeans simply don't care. Just look at what the Americans got.

latest


It doesn't even compare to this. How did the one above this one even pass? I swear, the euros have no sense of quality control at all.
They just put a render in front of a vortex, blurred it a tiny bit, and threw some logos in the corners. I could do better than that!
 
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Surprised no one has put the Ico boxarts in here. Here's the good one that was in the EU and Japan:

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Seems mystifying and adventurous right?
Let's look at the North American boxart:

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...oh. It's...a PS2 game all right. You can tell by the offputting graphics that are put front-and-center instead of a cool piece of art.
 
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