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Hey folks, and welcome to another edition of Box Art Brawl!
Before we jump into this week’s fight, let’s go back to last week. We looked at Sonic CD for the Sega CD and, unsurprisingly, the more action-packed box art for North America won the vote by a decent margin, at 48%. Europe came in second with 30%, and the odd spongy-titled Japanese box art finished with 22%.
This week, we’ll stick to Sega’s console lineup and take a look at Castlevania: Bloodlines. Released in 1994, the game was known in Japan as “Vampire Slayer” and in Europe as “Castlevania: the next generation”while North America took what would arguably become the game’s best-known title, ‘Lines’.
The game was well received by reviewers upon release, praising the faster pace and more action-oriented gameplay, but criticism was leveled at the visuals, which were considered inferior to the SNES title Super Castlevania IV.
Two of our competitors this week share similar designs for their respective box arts, but we’ll go for a three-way brawl if only for the stark difference in game titles.
Be sure to vote in the poll below; but first, let’s look at the box art designs themselves.
North America
Along with its title, the North American box art design is probably the most familiar to fans. We see our protagonist in the lower half of the composition and a whole bunch of nasty creatures surrounding him. The title “Bloodlines” itself is pretty macabre, with blood dripping from its letters to look like something straight out of RL Stine’s Goosebumps or something! We are big fans of this one.
Europe
The ‘next generation’ European design is perhaps a bit more ominous, with noticeably darker colors and an ominous red tone in the background, with flying bats and a blood-red moon looming in the background. the sky. The characters here are very well designed and their positions in the composition make for quite an impactful piece of art.
Japan
Japan’s design is more or less the same as Europe’s, except everything has been enlarged significantly to remove some of the empty black space. The main difference here, of course, is the title itself. We have ‘Vampire Killer’ which seems to have been written in blood and it’s quite striking; certainly more so than the rather boring “New Generation” title seen on the cover of Europe.
Thank you for voting! We’ll see you next time for another round of the Box Art Brawl.
