Poll: Box Art Brawl - Duel: Mario Vs. Donkey Kong

Japan's looks like a handout for the toys... Which is kind of unique but also an incredibly bad pick for boxart.

North America / Europe reflects what the game is about.The box tells a story.

North America and Europe easy. While the Japanese cover focuses on the Mini-Mario, the other shows what the game is practically about and shows Mario going against DK.

Japan’s box art shows us why the series went the direction it did.

NA/Europe’s box art shows us this is still a direct sequel to DK94 and it hasn’t gone down that road yet.

A real action figure

It's not even a contest. North America/Europe wins easily. Japan's box art is just plain ugly.

Surprised at the popularity of the EU/NA box art... 86% of the vote at the time I'm commenting this! The Japanese art is really unique in my opinion, it is my favourite of the two.

I like the ad for the mini-Mario on the bottom of the JPN art, but that’s about all I really like about that box art.

Europe for the win

I am starting to like the japanese one. So strange, in a pleasant way.

The North América/Europe boxart is fine. They should also use It again on the Switch version, which is not looking Very good

Love the Japanese cover. Fake ad for a mini figure? It’s just really offbeat, inventive and fun, and shows you don’t just need to splash exactly what happens in a game to be the best cover. Doesn’t look like many people agree with me, though.

@Paulo the Switch remake has a very piecemeal look about it, like it came from DK Maker.

Japan's is weeeeird. Combination of three distinct styles (pixel, smooth cartoon, and... I guess a magazine ad? Yuck.

It’s kinda funny the JP box shows the boring route the sequels would turn to.

I would've assumed the Japan one was a box for the actual toy, which I guess is the aim. But the western one is way better

I'm shocked that the japanese version got a single vote

If I saw the JP version in a store I wouldn't have thought it was even a video game.

Had to vote Japan. It’s so amazingly weird.

No contest! W easily goes to NA/Europe

Box Art Brawls Current Total:

Europe: 62

Japan: 65

North America: 69

Australia and New Zealand: 1

NA/EU this time. Games with box art that give some idea of what to expect are usually at an advantage IMO.

I do like the uniqueness of the Japanese cover's advertisement however.

NA looks like a natural continuation of the classic arcade, It brings new and nostalgia in the same amounts, a win for NA/EU

Japan really didn't do a good job here for once.

I talked about this in the other thread but the NA/Euro artwork is really good and reminds me a lot of the DK '94 artwork, which is possibly my favourite Mario cover ever, alonside Super Mario Land.

I have both enlarged and framed on my wall, along with a handful of other very similar box art from other series (Land of Illusion, some Dizzy games inc Fantastic Dizzy, MS Sonic Chaos) and this is the exact style that I am trying to recreate for my own games. To me, its important game box art for platformers or mascot based games is dynamic, shows the personality and motivation of the characters, and gives hints as to what the gameplay will be like and what the levels and areas will include. You have one chance to make and impression and "sell" the idea of your game, its characters and worlds to someone when they see your box on the shelf, or art pop up in an online shop recomendation.

By comparisson, the cover for the remake looks awful, basic and plain - to my eyes at least. I wish they'd go back to hand drawn Mario art for covers rather than renders using the same old models and basic lighting. Even then, it still sells the game far better than this Japanese cover. I don't understand what they were going for with it.

I like a high-concept box art but aesthetically I'm just not a fan of the Japanese one

You gotta reward the Japanese art for its weirdness. Where's your sense of whimsy?

I like NA's cover better, but I picked the Japanese one because it reminded me of when I was in kindergarten for some reason. 87%-13% is wild.

I went with the US art, but the JPN one is neat conceptually I'll admit.

I gotta go with the North American/European box art.

The Japanese one makes sense for a magazine ad, but not as the cover for the game. Yikes!

Nobody has realised that the ‘buzzwords’ at the bottom of the Japanese cover are the exact same words that are said in the television advert for Mini Mario during the game’s intro?

Either way, I think NA/EU’s is probably better.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the North American art. It gets the point across with some awesome 2D art. But... i'm going to have to go with Japan. It might not fit the game, but I love it! I would buy a poster of it. Can't say the same about the NA art. So Japan wins for me.

I like the concept behind the Japanese one, but being clever does not make it a good game cover. However, I would suggest it would fit very well as the back of the box. Remove the game title logo from it, and you have space for screenshots, which tended to be very small on Japanese boxes anyway.

The western cover is just way better as a game cover. It's well laid out and well drawn. It depicts the game in some way as well and succeeds in that.

Its neat that the Japanese one has the word-for-word script of the commercial Donkey Kong watches on the boxart.

Western box art is cute, colorful, and cartoony. The Japanese one looks like a low effort toy ad.

In this case, the western cover captures the essence of the game. The Japanese one could pass as a cover art for subsequent games on the series.

EDIT: As usual for these retro games, cartridge art.

Western:

Japanese

@Tempestryke that's more or less the intention. Same as the Japanese MvsDK 2:

I feel like Donkey Kong peeking over the corner on the Japanese one should be a meme.

While I like the Japanese box art it’s kinda bland and yet again I’m also kinda nostalgia biased like last week as I had thus game as a kid and loved the case. So I gotta go North America it’s just so much fun. Tho fun fact for anyone who doesn’t know. The buzzwords they have at the bottom of the Japanese box art is actually the commercial Donkey Kong hears at the beginning of the game and I know that because it ends with buy one buy them all and then it repeats buy them all like a echo in DKs head. It’s just said like goofily fast in the game proper.

Speaking of the opening of Mario vs. Donkey Kong, anyone knows the source of one of the audios used when DK is changing channels that says in Spanish "dos cero tres ochenta y ocho"?.
I'm pretty sure I've also heard it in Space Ghost Coast to Coast and in the Shaq Fu commercial.

EDIT: Not many people know this, but the Japanese version is compatible with the e-Reader, the cards add additional levels. I wonder if they'll include them or a level editor on the Switch version.

NGL, the japanese art is a very cool concept with the faux-ad, but i prefer the US art.

@HammerGalladeBro I don't know where it originates from, but its quite commonly used because it was part of a "sample CD" that was sold and distributed and used by djs, musicians, in video production etc. I don't remember the name of the CD sadly (we had it at a recording studio I worked for years ago) but the same CD also had the "Owww! .... yeah!" sample that's used in countless beats for pop music and hip-hop from the late 80s to today, and the "Would you stop playing with that radio of yours? I'm trying to get to sleep" sample used in quite a few videogame tracks and also famously George Michael's "Too Funky".

What's interesting to me is that those are taken from a Run DMC live Funhouse performance, and a Tony Hancock episode respectively, so technically both are copyrighted material that was just chopped out and put on a sample collection as if it was royalty free... but I doubt they asked permission. The individual pieces of music or video that use them certainly don't because they assume that because they bought the Sample CD, everything is cleared and Royalty free, even though technically I don't think they are.

So its likely that that Spanish sample appears all over the place, but also originates from some relatively obscure but mainstream piece of media and the people who put it on the original CD thought no-one would notice. Its probably like the Roblox "Oof" that was used literally millions of times and thought to be free, before the "owner" realised. I put owner in inverted commas, because everything should be when it comes to Tallarico. 😂

I much prefer the Japanese one.

The NA one is one of my favorite box arts of all time. I bought a store display from this game on eBay because I love this art so much.

Japan getting massacred in the poll, and rightly so. It's total garbo by comparison. Tells you very little about the game.

It says Mario VS. Donkey Kong right on the box. Only one boxart gives a sense of the duel promised.

The NA one. I remember looking at the games section in Walmart that day and saw the game. The boxart looked fantastic, and I bought it.

Am Inthe only one who orefered this style of Mario vs. Donkey Kong over what they did with the later games?

The toys never grabbed me really!

voted NA because it has both the lnik to classic DK, as a toy, but i wonder if they followed the toy thing through in the manual (and contents) of the japanese game... then it would work

(so the manual would presents itself as a toymanual to mario)

@JohnnyMind I loved the GB game too!