Megadrive Box art, my love of the Japanese art 2: Jewel Master

So I made a post back on Thursday the 28th of July 2016 about my love of Japanese Mega Drive box art. As I previously said when I was younger I had a lot of  Japanese MegaDrive Games, the main reason for this was that older Japanese titles which had since been released in the UK tended to be ridiculously cheap in comparison to there UK equivalents. So it was a cheap way of getting lots of games for little cash. Now days though things are a little bit diffrent it is often far cheaper to get an English copy of a game than it is a Japanese game So I proberbly only have 4 boxed Japanese games in my collection but I still love to look at the Japanese case art. (I have Japanese copies of Eswat, Gain Ground, Monaco GP2 and Arrow Flash

This is what led me to do a post showing an example of the diffrence between box art which can be seen here. http://kerr9000.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/megadrive-box-art-my-love-of-japanese.html

In that post I only showed the art for one game and that was Eswat, the reason for this was that It was an extreme case where I feel the Japanese art was a million times better than the European and American but it wasnt the only case, this was a topic I always intended to return to but  somehow I kept forgetting, other topics came up, other ideas came into my head

There is a lot of box art I could talk about but as a friend the blogger DS90 has written several simmilar posts that include comparisons between streets of rage and Golden Axe covers I will leave those alone and just post a link to his box art posts here http://ds90gamer.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Box%20Art, I recomend you have a look at them.

In bringing this back as a returning subject I have decided that I will start with a game I have a great love for, I own this game and play it quite a bit, but I am dissapointed to say I own the English version and I am sure once you have seen the covers you will know why.

This is the English Cover, I am not saying that its a bad cover, but I think it could be a lot better, and the funny thing is in the game you can have up to 4 magical rings on at a time but only 2 on each hand so its technically inacurate as well, still its passable.

This is the American version it is basically the same piece of central artwork but they have shrunk the picture down and given the case more well for want of a better term blank space. (They also appear to have turned the contrast up).

This is the Japanese cover and I simply love it, the main piece of art might not show any form of battle or action but it is I think in its own right a beautiful piece of art. I do admit there are issues in that you see a man holding a sword where as in the game the weapons are your rings but its something I would be more than happy to have up on my wall in a frame.

Once again I couldnt help myself but try to make an English case which would use the central picture and themes from the Japanese case but incorporate our logo's and feel. I know my work is not perfect but this is basically someone spending 10 minutes using nothing more than a graphics programme to cut and paste elements togther. Yes when I did the custom Eswat cover I made a few actual alterations to the cover but I dont think the main piece of art on this cover could be alterd in anyway which would improve it at least not with my talents. I did look at the image at diffrent levels of contrast and brightnes but as far as I was concerned the image looked its best as is.