Sega Nerds

Box Art Bash: Phantasy Star II

by Nathan on June 25th, 2008

Hello and welcome to another rousing edition of the Box Art Bash, where I take you on a tour through the smelly parts of Sega’s colorful history of game cover art. As always, if you have a great suggestion for a future entry of the Box Art Bash, comment here or e-mail me.

Last Wednesday we covered the sinewy Golden Axe. This week we switch focus from muscled western Adonises to anime girls. Uh, wait a second.

Click for large image.

The most baffling aspect of this cover art, to me, is that it is so consummately incongruous to the actual style represented in the game. Phantasy Star is a JRPG, a genre already influenced heavily by anime and Japanese pop art. So it might come as quite the shock to some when they learn that the Phantasy Star series looks so much like anime Sega may as well have sold the games as manga books where you mash A to turn pages. When you consider how popular anime is nowadays, it might seem strange that the American cover doesn’t look Japanese at all.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, anime in America was limited to badly dubbed episodes of Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh that fanatics bought bootlegged from shady Asian men at flea markets. I’m an avid fan of anime myself, having watched obscure underground titles such as Cowboy Pre-Op and The Lemon Collie of Haruhi Suzuki, so I can say with some authority that the American cover of Phantasy Star II is most definitely NOT anime. What a shock for children in 1990 who turned the game on for the first time, only to be greeted by huge eyes, huge mouths and tiny noses!

Enough about Asian cartoons. Both subjects in the cover have gray holes where they should have eyes, giving them the appearance of wax figures or possibly waxed corpses. This gives the art the marketable quality of terrifying horror, rather than slight discomfort.

The lovely purple-haired Nei looks more like the test subject of an experiment that attempted to combine a monkey with a giraffe with Joan Rivers. On top of sporting a tit job that would make a guy with a lazy eye look intelligent, she’s got bullhorns for ears. I guess they’d make good handlebars if you could get over the Michael Jackson nose.

There doesn’t seem much to discuss about Rolf, if that’s who he is. He looks like he took a cue from Bruce Banner and bought himself some kickin’ purple shorts in case he has a gamma radiation accident, which doesn’t seem likely since he looks older than Clint Eastwood and probably doesn’t move much without assistance. His gun looks about as lethal as a toy, and the most harm it could likely do to someone is poke their eye out on accident.

My favorite part is the breakout circle proudly proclaiming “A massive adventure” and “6 MEGA MEMORY” which, in a strictly technical sense, doesn’t actually mean anything.

The cover art as a whole is kind of tiring to look at, since the palette consists of about two colors. The background kind of looks like a scene from Total Recall, which was a much better movie. Arnold is so smooth, so badass… Wait, we’re not talking about movies? Screw this.

Share This

POSTED IN: Genesis, Nathan, North America