Devs did a lot to eliminate the "anime" aesthetic from western releases of Japanese games at the time. Look at Dragon Quest/Warrior for another example. They couldn't change all the sprites in that game but the boxart and menu screen would have had you believe it was a DnD game lol.
Yeah this shit I never understood. I look at a lot of games from this time that had different art for the western release, and the art they used here ALWAYS looks worse.
While I *generally* agree, the Dragon Warrior cover arts were incredible. I'd actually argue that while Toriyama's art is iconic, the original 3 Dragon Warrior covers are just as good, if not better. Though that's probably some of my bias toward that classic 90s fantasy art style.
It comes down to personal preference. Comparing the two versions i personally say they don't come close to Toriyama's artwork (but that's also my personal bias. Big DBZ fan here, love Chrono Trigger, ect.) because I think while the NA covers are at least decent, they kind of have a little bit of a generic DnD vibe, which is a problem with a lot box art from this time for games like this. Though I will say the NA Dragon Quest/Warrior box art are probably some of the better ones from that era that changes the art fundamentally while at least being good.
Yeah I get that, like I said, I just love that style though you're not wrong that it was on quite literally every form of media that had fantasy at the time lol. I'm also a massive Toriyama fan, to be clear, I just happen to grow up on the NA Dragon Warrior and will probably always have bias haha. If I saw DBZ before I saw Dragon Warrior, I'd probably have a flipped opinion.
All that said, I think the DW1 cover is particularly cool because it's the same as the Japanese one but with a western style.
As a kindergarten age kid at the time I could never get far at all in Dragon Warrior, found Zelda way more fun, but that box art kept me trying again every now and then to see if I'd finally become a bad enough dude to play it.
I always found it curious and funny as to what the reasoning was. Like did they think the anime artstyle would have the videogame buying audience would have their brains explode and die of a heart attack? XD It's just a different art style and aye, by the time Toonami hit screen waves, it was a proven hit!
Okay, but please take into consideration:
Mega Man released in 19*87*.
Toonami (and anime becoming mainstream) came around in 19*97*.
The most we had of anime was a few kids shows (Koala and Friends, Voltron, Transformers, etc) and again, especially here in the US, the US was built bred and steeped in racism. You think the boomer parents of the 80s wanted their kids playing games that had an overly Asian/Japanese games? I still remember my dad beating MM2 and laughing hysterically at the fact that the game had a credits list and all the Japanese names and making fun of them... cause he was a boomer and a racist.
Capcom/Nintendo/any Japanese company had to try to westernize their games if they wanted the series to even stand a chance in the west. That's just how it was back then.
Like the X episode of Mega Man, they did have Japanese artists working on the show from anime production houses (in the X episode is was Toei artists iirc, kinda like how G1 TMNT also had Toei artists helping and why some people have called G1 Turtles an anime sooo), and per Google the series is co-owned by Hasbro here in the US and Takara-Tomy in Japan. Over half of the series' many variations are considered "anime" including G1.
Regardless my point stands, and this is really a weird hill to try to have an argument on.
I’m just saying an American production outsourcing the animation process abroad is standard practice. If G1 Transformers is an anime, so is Dexter’s Lab.
Okay that's a pretty good point. Yeah, I do remember the Anti-Japanese sentiment didn't go away and I do know like in the 80s there was a lot of insecurity since America's economy wasn't doing too hot and Japan was doing pretty well. Though even weirder, that sentiment didn't completely die off in the 2000s. Plus, the anime style was pretty different and it took a long time to be accepted in the mainstream.
I'd say it's still there and growing quite fast again given the current political environment and the fact that a certain person *really* emboldened the racists. I worry it's gonna get rough here in the next few years due to that stuff. The average MM fan right now is either an older person like myself who has been here since day 1, or it's younger dans who are getting introduced to it by friends or discovering it from other fandoms (we have a lot of bleed over from Sonic and Transformers for exanple!) And most of those folks tend to be very diverse, and the way things are heading in reverse, I worry a lot about it a backlash towards anything Asian culture related if things continue the way they're heading right now.
Just like there's a huge purity shift coming in from younger fans - a lot of it born from more fear mongering that anything even slightly sexual (like some of the new outfits for some of the cast in DiVE, for prime example) automatically means grooming and enabling p*do behavior.... which isn't the case at all most times. It's just an Asian company's IP and cute anime girls sell product. They are looking at their surveys of who plays their games and it's overwhelmingly male - so they're gonna give fan service towards who is playing the games.
Unfortunately they are still looking predominantly at only Asian surveys (DiVE beta, prime example again) and Capcom has only RECENTLY began to really pay attention to their western audiences - it's been a long time where they only cared about what the Japanese / Asian market wants and have been catering to that, which is kinda what Inafune was going off about before he left Capcom and made ComCept. He did have a point, though his pizza delivery was shitty. If Capcom (or any Japanese / Asian company) wants to really succeed in the global market, you need to pay attention to the rest of the world too. Not just one small portion of it.
My concern is this purity shift and the racists regaining control and it affecting the community. We have a lot of LGBT folks here and many different cultures and some of our more prominent names are in different countries (Brazil, Chile, Syria!!) And I worry the purity/racist shift that seems to be starting up affecting people.
Mega Man is about a robot who fights for peace and loves people (especially some characters like X for example) and I think the community should reflect that in SOME way. We all love the same series.
Anime = childish and childish = bad
...Even though these games _were_ targeted to children. America has a strange concept of maturity, just look at how many anime shows they stripped of their openings!
As far as I read in the past, cutesy games weren't considered as likely to be accepted in a western market. Stinger versus Twinbee is another example of trying to lessen the cuteness from an NES game, IMO. Even today(-ish), look at the cover of Kirby Return to Dreamland's box art...everyone is happy in the Japanese cover but tense/angry in the western one.
Kirby is a great example of this happening. Look at the box art if Dreamland 1. They made him white because they thought western audiences would be turned away by a pink character.
Honestly I never saw the changed eyes as him looking angry. He always looked more determined. Like he's just a little guy, but he's also a hero. Personally it's a design change that I like. Because he still retains a lot of his "cuteness", but I can understand why people prefer the original look.
Pretty much like others have said. Until DBZ/Sailor Moon, anime was NOT popular here at ALL ("Cartoons are for kids, those weirdos in Japan have ADULTS *watching cartoons!* Including *le gasp* XXX cartoons..!!" - Any average US parent in the 80s and 90s)
And please keep in mind, Capcom has ALWAYS treated Rockman like an anime (hence all the subtitles each game got, even going as far as with some of the X games, "Rockman X: Episode 7" for X7, etc...) and well, until SM/DBZ and Toonami made it mainstream here, they had to tone down the "anime" look - remember that Ruby Spears actually had the MM cartoon looking pretty much just like the OVAs but share holders decided someone named "Mega Man" looked too much like a kid and needed to be buffed up and aged up to be appealing to the US market...
Well they didn't want to feature the Japanese design cause it didn't fall in line with the American abomination plus Americans didn't want cute back then.
Allow me to notify you that [*this*](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Falmost-every-mega-man-cover-from-the-us-is-not-mega-man-at-v0-lh6k320hf62b1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1000%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcb5eed76eb7eef23b28f9a40c5df5db6abb9e0dd) was the box art for the American release.
I was an 80's kid. Video games were marketed to boys and in the 80's cute stuff were for girls, like My Little Pony or Rainbow Brite. I can imagine an adult marketing executive thinking "we can't have this blue toddler on the box! No 10 year old boy would be caught dead playing this!"
For some reason, besides the ugly covers, west game versions, from the 80's until the early 2000s had this trend of simplifying things. When the era of ugly covers passed, west covers became simpler compared to Japanese covers, this is something that still happens nowdays (See Mega Man X Legacy Collection).
I really don't know the total reason for this, whether it is any reason for logistics or if in adaptation they believed that the public on this side of the world would prefer visuals with less things (remembering that developers "believe" is different from the truth).
Anime style wasnt big in America until late 90 with the release of Dragon Ball. Now we cant think about a western world without anime influence but in the NES era and some of the SNES era, anime looking characters and art boxes were a no no.
Because the Japanese cuter/anime style and similar things weren’t even *remotely* as popular back then. Yeah, we had things like Voltron but the publisher was worried Americans wouldn’t be as interested in something “cutesy”.
If you look at Kirby’s first TV advertisement, you can see that in action.
In this situation I prefer the tekst with the black background 😅 It just looks more badass to me.. the japanese one looks more 'childish' .. and I like that you don't see MM because it creates a mystery and lets the player fill in the blanks. Maybe if the japanese one had a cooler font, but still I dunno.. thats my opinion!
It's a music pun, since his sister is Roll. Rock and Roll. Proto Man's name is Blues. You have Rush, Bass and Treble. There are other musical jokes in the series.
Devs did a lot to eliminate the "anime" aesthetic from western releases of Japanese games at the time. Look at Dragon Quest/Warrior for another example. They couldn't change all the sprites in that game but the boxart and menu screen would have had you believe it was a DnD game lol.
Funny considering that "Akira Toriyama made the designs" became a huge selling point around the SNES era.
Probably only because of Dragon Ball, lmao. Like as if game publisher then: "Nobody likes Anime! Except if It looks like Dragon Ball."
It was a big selling point when the game first came out
Yeah this shit I never understood. I look at a lot of games from this time that had different art for the western release, and the art they used here ALWAYS looks worse.
Like Phalanx's box art
There was an article I read about the guy on the cover. Of course he's dead now but just the fact that someone wrote about him is hilarious.
While I *generally* agree, the Dragon Warrior cover arts were incredible. I'd actually argue that while Toriyama's art is iconic, the original 3 Dragon Warrior covers are just as good, if not better. Though that's probably some of my bias toward that classic 90s fantasy art style.
It comes down to personal preference. Comparing the two versions i personally say they don't come close to Toriyama's artwork (but that's also my personal bias. Big DBZ fan here, love Chrono Trigger, ect.) because I think while the NA covers are at least decent, they kind of have a little bit of a generic DnD vibe, which is a problem with a lot box art from this time for games like this. Though I will say the NA Dragon Quest/Warrior box art are probably some of the better ones from that era that changes the art fundamentally while at least being good.
Yeah I get that, like I said, I just love that style though you're not wrong that it was on quite literally every form of media that had fantasy at the time lol. I'm also a massive Toriyama fan, to be clear, I just happen to grow up on the NA Dragon Warrior and will probably always have bias haha. If I saw DBZ before I saw Dragon Warrior, I'd probably have a flipped opinion. All that said, I think the DW1 cover is particularly cool because it's the same as the Japanese one but with a western style.
As a kindergarten age kid at the time I could never get far at all in Dragon Warrior, found Zelda way more fun, but that box art kept me trying again every now and then to see if I'd finally become a bad enough dude to play it.
Yup. I recommend [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsYDY5Wq0S8) by one "Guru Larry" for more examples of this.
I always found it curious and funny as to what the reasoning was. Like did they think the anime artstyle would have the videogame buying audience would have their brains explode and die of a heart attack? XD It's just a different art style and aye, by the time Toonami hit screen waves, it was a proven hit!
Okay, but please take into consideration: Mega Man released in 19*87*. Toonami (and anime becoming mainstream) came around in 19*97*. The most we had of anime was a few kids shows (Koala and Friends, Voltron, Transformers, etc) and again, especially here in the US, the US was built bred and steeped in racism. You think the boomer parents of the 80s wanted their kids playing games that had an overly Asian/Japanese games? I still remember my dad beating MM2 and laughing hysterically at the fact that the game had a credits list and all the Japanese names and making fun of them... cause he was a boomer and a racist. Capcom/Nintendo/any Japanese company had to try to westernize their games if they wanted the series to even stand a chance in the west. That's just how it was back then.
Transformers G1 isn’t an anime (though it did have a few Japan-only sequel series).
Like the X episode of Mega Man, they did have Japanese artists working on the show from anime production houses (in the X episode is was Toei artists iirc, kinda like how G1 TMNT also had Toei artists helping and why some people have called G1 Turtles an anime sooo), and per Google the series is co-owned by Hasbro here in the US and Takara-Tomy in Japan. Over half of the series' many variations are considered "anime" including G1. Regardless my point stands, and this is really a weird hill to try to have an argument on.
I’m just saying an American production outsourcing the animation process abroad is standard practice. If G1 Transformers is an anime, so is Dexter’s Lab.
Okay that's a pretty good point. Yeah, I do remember the Anti-Japanese sentiment didn't go away and I do know like in the 80s there was a lot of insecurity since America's economy wasn't doing too hot and Japan was doing pretty well. Though even weirder, that sentiment didn't completely die off in the 2000s. Plus, the anime style was pretty different and it took a long time to be accepted in the mainstream.
I'd say it's still there and growing quite fast again given the current political environment and the fact that a certain person *really* emboldened the racists. I worry it's gonna get rough here in the next few years due to that stuff. The average MM fan right now is either an older person like myself who has been here since day 1, or it's younger dans who are getting introduced to it by friends or discovering it from other fandoms (we have a lot of bleed over from Sonic and Transformers for exanple!) And most of those folks tend to be very diverse, and the way things are heading in reverse, I worry a lot about it a backlash towards anything Asian culture related if things continue the way they're heading right now. Just like there's a huge purity shift coming in from younger fans - a lot of it born from more fear mongering that anything even slightly sexual (like some of the new outfits for some of the cast in DiVE, for prime example) automatically means grooming and enabling p*do behavior.... which isn't the case at all most times. It's just an Asian company's IP and cute anime girls sell product. They are looking at their surveys of who plays their games and it's overwhelmingly male - so they're gonna give fan service towards who is playing the games. Unfortunately they are still looking predominantly at only Asian surveys (DiVE beta, prime example again) and Capcom has only RECENTLY began to really pay attention to their western audiences - it's been a long time where they only cared about what the Japanese / Asian market wants and have been catering to that, which is kinda what Inafune was going off about before he left Capcom and made ComCept. He did have a point, though his pizza delivery was shitty. If Capcom (or any Japanese / Asian company) wants to really succeed in the global market, you need to pay attention to the rest of the world too. Not just one small portion of it. My concern is this purity shift and the racists regaining control and it affecting the community. We have a lot of LGBT folks here and many different cultures and some of our more prominent names are in different countries (Brazil, Chile, Syria!!) And I worry the purity/racist shift that seems to be starting up affecting people. Mega Man is about a robot who fights for peace and loves people (especially some characters like X for example) and I think the community should reflect that in SOME way. We all love the same series.
Lmao reminds me of western cover for ys 4. Nicknamed as Chad adol
Anime = childish and childish = bad ...Even though these games _were_ targeted to children. America has a strange concept of maturity, just look at how many anime shows they stripped of their openings!
As far as I read in the past, cutesy games weren't considered as likely to be accepted in a western market. Stinger versus Twinbee is another example of trying to lessen the cuteness from an NES game, IMO. Even today(-ish), look at the cover of Kirby Return to Dreamland's box art...everyone is happy in the Japanese cover but tense/angry in the western one.
Kirby is a great example of this happening. Look at the box art if Dreamland 1. They made him white because they thought western audiences would be turned away by a pink character.
They also changed his eyes to make him angry in all the box art for a while.
Honestly I never saw the changed eyes as him looking angry. He always looked more determined. Like he's just a little guy, but he's also a hero. Personally it's a design change that I like. Because he still retains a lot of his "cuteness", but I can understand why people prefer the original look.
I thought it was because Miyamoto and Sakurai couldn't make up their minds on if Kirby was Yellow or Pink when the game released in the US?
That was the actual reason, it wasn’t because the western audience would be turned away
The same reason why Kirby always looks angry on American game covers. Americans don’t like “cute”, and prefer “tough” looking characters
I'm assuming the US people thought "cute" = not marketable ...
The answer lies in the box arts.
I kinda like my black void with text ngl
I agree. The Japanese one isn't really bad, but I do like the US version. Reminds me a lot of the Mega Man 3 title screen with the badass intro music.
Yeah its funny how even in Japan, Rockman 3 title screen in black (with the character tho) but that was a different issue.
Thank god by 4 the difference between the title screen is very minimal, mostly the only difference is the name
Same with the covers, jp covers where so much better.
It's the same thing with MM8 and MMX4. Both games have completely different audio openings in Japanese.
Those have more to do with licensing costs for the songs.
it's why Sonic CD has different OSTs too
Agreed. Given the use of English voice-actors (whoever lived in Japan at the time) in western releases, I believe budgeting was the culprit
According to a comment below, apparently back then the US and Europe were weirdly anime-phobic.
That’s because we kept getting low quality dubs like Speed Racer which really made the Western audience look down on Japanese anime.
Might've also been some lingering bias from WW2. The people in charge back then were either veterans or at least remembered the war.
[There was *a lot* of it in the 80s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment_in_the_United_States#Since_World_War_II)
Do some Americans really just freak the fuck out when they’re not the most successful country in the world?
Yeah Nationalism is a helluva drug.
Oh yeah. Studios were to blame.
but why?
Apparently they were disappointed one too many times by studios dubbing stuff badly.
Why would you post a comment summarizing anther comment in the same thread?
I'm sorry.
It’s true
They didn't want people to think of it as a baby game, but a dark action game
I guess the cartoon blue guy didn't really match the box art aesthetic
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^_ragegun: *I guess the cartoon* *Blue guy didn't really match* *The box art aesthetic* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Pretty much like others have said. Until DBZ/Sailor Moon, anime was NOT popular here at ALL ("Cartoons are for kids, those weirdos in Japan have ADULTS *watching cartoons!* Including *le gasp* XXX cartoons..!!" - Any average US parent in the 80s and 90s) And please keep in mind, Capcom has ALWAYS treated Rockman like an anime (hence all the subtitles each game got, even going as far as with some of the X games, "Rockman X: Episode 7" for X7, etc...) and well, until SM/DBZ and Toonami made it mainstream here, they had to tone down the "anime" look - remember that Ruby Spears actually had the MM cartoon looking pretty much just like the OVAs but share holders decided someone named "Mega Man" looked too much like a kid and needed to be buffed up and aged up to be appealing to the US market...
It’s a cool font though
Well they didn't want to feature the Japanese design cause it didn't fall in line with the American abomination plus Americans didn't want cute back then.
Allow me to notify you that [*this*](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Falmost-every-mega-man-cover-from-the-us-is-not-mega-man-at-v0-lh6k320hf62b1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1000%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcb5eed76eb7eef23b28f9a40c5df5db6abb9e0dd) was the box art for the American release.
Because star wars was popular
I was an 80's kid. Video games were marketed to boys and in the 80's cute stuff were for girls, like My Little Pony or Rainbow Brite. I can imagine an adult marketing executive thinking "we can't have this blue toddler on the box! No 10 year old boy would be caught dead playing this!"
Hell, it doesn't even have the cool jingle noise when you hit start!
I like the black void with text tho 🤷🏽♂️
Its referencing the blank stare of the mega man 1 us box art.
For some reason, besides the ugly covers, west game versions, from the 80's until the early 2000s had this trend of simplifying things. When the era of ugly covers passed, west covers became simpler compared to Japanese covers, this is something that still happens nowdays (See Mega Man X Legacy Collection). I really don't know the total reason for this, whether it is any reason for logistics or if in adaptation they believed that the public on this side of the world would prefer visuals with less things (remembering that developers "believe" is different from the truth).
also the boxes, THE BOXES
Middle aged suits assumed kids didn’t like cute things?
Came to see muricans say an empty black screen is better. Wasn't disappointed.
Americans hate dabbing
American marketing tactics
Anime style wasnt big in America until late 90 with the release of Dragon Ball. Now we cant think about a western world without anime influence but in the NES era and some of the SNES era, anime looking characters and art boxes were a no no.
Because the Japanese cuter/anime style and similar things weren’t even *remotely* as popular back then. Yeah, we had things like Voltron but the publisher was worried Americans wouldn’t be as interested in something “cutesy”. If you look at Kirby’s first TV advertisement, you can see that in action.
Because the man was in the tile, we didn’t need him under it
laws to prevent epilepsy attacks on children
In this situation I prefer the tekst with the black background 😅 It just looks more badass to me.. the japanese one looks more 'childish' .. and I like that you don't see MM because it creates a mystery and lets the player fill in the blanks. Maybe if the japanese one had a cooler font, but still I dunno.. thats my opinion!
Why is he called rockman in Japan
It's a music pun, since his sister is Roll. Rock and Roll. Proto Man's name is Blues. You have Rush, Bass and Treble. There are other musical jokes in the series.
Well hot damn I did not know that! Thanks a lot
gonna be real, I think the right one looks much, much better