I prefer Crystalis to The Legend of Zelda. This was perhaps an inexcusable heresy in the days when Nintendo ruled the game industry, but today anyone can stand proud in the opinion that Crystalis, a 1990 action-RPG from SNK, is superior to the first The Legend of Zelda, which came out three years prior and was far more primitive. The evolutions of those years give Crystalis better visuals, a dose of Miyazaki-inspired apocalyptic gloom, and gameplay with actual jumping. I like Crystalis better, even if it ends the world over a decade ago.
For box art, Crystalis didn't get a good deal anywhere. Some assume that the Japanese art for games from the NES-Famicom era generally stood above its North American counterparts, but this was seldom true. Japan's Famicom covers were often crude, seemingly provided by programmers who could also draw a big-eyed manga character or two.
There's something off about the cover of God Slayer: Sonata of the Distant Sky, the far more controversially titled Japanese version of Crystalis. The art isn't terrible, but the composition is jarring. The game's hero, named by the player, has a static pose and an embarrassed expression, as though he's just looking for a place to leave that burning sword so he can clock out for the day. Then there's the glittering fortress in the sky. A key fixture of the game's post-apocalyptic imagery, it looks more like a salad bowl here. Or perhaps an inverted steel jellyfish. Also note the background, straight off those "Jams" shorts that those darn kids were wearing when Crystalis was new.
The North American cover of Crystalis might not reflect the game quite so well, but it's easy to call it an artistic improvement. In coloring and composition, it's a far more interesting display, and its version of the floating tower looks more like a tower, albeit one that could just as easily be resting on a hillside. The elfin paladin and his flowing tresses are nothing like the pink-haired, sensibly coiffed hero of Crystalis, and his sword and shield apparently came from a costume owned by many kids of the 1980s (who became Crystalis heroes for Halloween without ever realizing it). Yet the monsters he faces are indeed based on enemies from the game, from the werewolf to the sluglike green blob, the latter of which is openly aghast at all of the goings-on. SNK was so fond of this interpretation of the game that it became a North American commercial.
This was not the only cover Crystalis saw in the U.S., as it was ported to the Game Boy Color in 2000. This version changes a few things, most noticeably in warping the game's cutscenes from simplified anime imagery into oddly Westernized fantasy art. This is bluntly apparent on the game's cover, in which Dracula fires spotlights at a flabbergasted medieval-fantasy hero.
And that's why most people prefer the NES version of Crystalis.
