Poll: Box Art Brawl - Dragon Power (NES)

The USA version cover design was like American people were not ready to accept anime looking character during that time so the generic design being made to appeal American people taste.

Oh, the american Sangoku has been through the same design worries as Megaman.

That game was so disappointing...

The American one actually appealed to me. It's dynamic and more mature compared to the others.

Honestly, anyone who likes and respects Dragonball should not choose the US version. It's way too heavily edited to not even be Dragonball anymore. But I guess it was the first Dragonball game so can't blame them too much for changing it at the time.

Japan for me either way. Not a big fan of his the art is awkwardly slapped onto the European one, but it's still leagues better than the US one, imho.

Tentative titles:
"Dragon Power : Soles of the Feet"
"Dragon Power : Straightest Hair Ever"

I voted for JP, and then I saw that the EU version has the Seal of Quality. Damn! How can I change my vote?

Was super surprised to see the Dragon Ball covers considering the name of the article 🤣! Definitely a Japan win this week.

Japan by far, clear, concise, has the Toriyama artwork and no clutter.

It's so bizarre to think about this nowadays, but reskinning games to change or remove a licensed IP was really commonplace. Not just on NES, but on Sega too, as well as GB. It really was a thing.

Imagine if this happened today - image if Dragon Ball Fighterz was reskinned into generic kung fu guys for the international market. It would be insanity.

Nowadays audiences are so much more clued-in than they used to be. Fans want the original games, so reskinning them just completely isn't a thing any more.

In fact, there is one example I can think of of a more modern reskin that went poorly - in 2015, Sega tried to localise their Puyo Puyo Quest mobile game under the name "Cranky Food Friends".
It was shut down in less than a year, with the main criticism from players being how Sega changed it from beloved Puyo Puyo characters to generic mobile rubbish. So even ten years ago, reskins didn't fly with fans.

I'm very much glad that reskinning games is a thing of the past.

I hope the 8% that voted NA did it as a joke

@Bydlak
LOL, the main character is a child

Not really a fair fight, is it?

JP. Almost voted for NA due to how goofy looking it is, but it just isn’t as ridiculous as the NA Mega Man box art, which was so bad that it was actually good. NA here is just “okay”, but JP looks much more appealing

You should be ashamed of yourself if you picked NA.......

Similar to the above, I voted EU for the pixel art!

Also I've never heard of Dragon Power, so that's neat.

JP for me! I remember playing the American release back in the day, not realizing how homogenized it was.

You’ve gotta love the overly aggressive localizations back then. They really wanted to keep us kids of the 70s and 80s in the dark about where our favorite games and cartoons were coming from. I watched so many bad dubs, I didn’t think lip-synching was possible in cartoons!

Voted for Europe because I liked how the sprites were on the box. Most games back then (and even now) dont do that, and it's neat!

Key art will always win for me, so even though NA is endearingly cheesy, JP takes it for me. Europe is ok but too busy for me.

So, I'm not voting. Japanese is best overall, but the pixel art on Europe in their little boxes is a really cool touch and the cheesy, ever so eighties American one is so of it's era that it becomes highly likable and endearing. Basically, I like them all equally for different reasons.
Edit- wow, wish my comment wasn't underneath the one above, it's like I read it and said 'that will do, thanks for making my opinion'. It's embarrassingly similar

So, JP VS EU Box Art? Both are very good (I voted for the JP version).

The NA Box Art is ugly.

@RootsGenoa

Still that's the only one of these covers that would catch my glimpse for that matter.

Japan by a Shenron length. I'm too Toriyama biased. EU is good too, but I don't like how the art is fragmented by the character intros. Though I like the idea.

NA...No. just no.

I picked the JA version since it's better version mainly because the NA and EU versions have ugly design choices or changes made to them.

Box Art Brawls Current Total:

Europe: 109

Japan: 105

North America: 127

Australia and New Zealand: 1

Cover aside this game was impossible for me as a child, it had a weird timer that I think was also health. Thanks for bringing back bad memories

Find that Dragon Ball. Look out for them all. What a great japan box art this will be.

Yup voting for Japan. When I saw dragon power I was like 'wait, isn't this really a DB game?'

The fact that people are actually voting for Dragon Power instead of Dragon Ball NES's cover art is insane

Clearly, the dude on the NA box has that guy who has the look of a hero....in spite of his outfit....and everything else about him. Who wouldn't want to play as that guy?

Okay, in all seriousness, Japan by a mile. I like Toriyama's art(didn't always like it), but the whole thing is conceptually better and more appealing regardless. And professional. It looks way more professional. Credit to Europe for using the Japanese art without modifying it, but putting that horizontal art on a vertical box meant it had to be smaller with a lot of empty space, which is why those pixel portraits are in the lower left. It's so weird how Japan and the US used different box orientations back then. NES was vertical while Famicom was horizontal. SNES was horizontal while Super Famicom was vertical. Weird how they flipped and how out of sync things were back in the day.

Gobsmacked people would actually vote for the NA version.

It's a full-cover Akira Toriyama piece, you just can't beat that.

NA is the clear winner here. Masterfully illustrated by a far superior artist to whatever nobody scribbled the JP cover. Probably just faded away into obscurity.

I like how the North American one has a constipated Karate Kid on the cover.
And I like how the European one took the Japanese art and said: OK, anime characters we can live with, but speed lines? That's taking it too far for our delicate western audiences.

Pity vote for North America because I already tell where that was going.

@N64-ROX The French cover (as far I know, the "Europe" version was exclusive to France) was like "well our art only takes up the middle of the box. We have to fill the rest with SOMETHING."

@EarthboundBenjy It's not actually a completely dead practice. Pokemon Friends was recently found to be a reskin of another mobile game from the same developer released in 2016, called Think! Think!

All I can say about this is, too bad there wasn't digital delivery in 1988.

Karate guy all the way.
Only a black belt is capable of unleashing that kind of Dragon Power!!!!!

Japan wins it for me

I remember being given this game as a little kid when it came out.... And I hated it soooo much.

It felt like the worst Zelda ripoff in the world. I still look at that NA art and cringe...

Ah, the days when it was more common to reskin games when it came to deal with regionalized source licenses as opposed to just leaving them inaccessible completely. Back when the Internet wasn't widespread, it was far easier to get away with such a thing--after all, back in the late 1980s, would any westerner have been expected to have even heard of Anmitsu Hime, much less been able to piece together that its licensed Master System game was reskinned into Alex Kidd: High-Tech World for the western market?

(It's also the whole "untranslatable source license" deal that I believe J.J. & Jeff on TurboGrafx-16 caught a bit too much flak for the censorship it underwent. Yes, the content certainly was toned down for the western market, that much is undeniable, but its original Japanese incarnation had an untranslatable source license, meaning they actually had a valid excuse to tone things down. Now, "Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan" did have one segment get adapted internationally--the segment in question led to "America's Funniest Home Videos"--but the licensed video game in question adapted a different segment of the original Japanese show unrelated to the home video portion of the format...)

You know "Bad Box Art Mega Man", but here comes Bad Box Art "Goku".

The real Nazo (Mystery) is if the game had a rerelase, would it still be Dragon Power in NA?

The Japan design is superior on this one, but the NA box art just captures 1980s NES feel perfectly.

NA cover is disrespect to what is now such a massively popular franchise...

Sure the Japanese one is the best.

......but you know the NA one made you giggle. And who doesn't like to giggle?

I found it a glorious representation of old school '80s game art.

The US version has that kinda bad and cheesy art that's charming for the time... but the Japanese version absolutely clears.

I cannot lie, if I saw that US box art in the store, it would have definitely piqued my interest.

But, young me not knowing anything about Dragonball, would have been even more interested in the Japanese version.

So, I do not hate the US version, it has that NES charm that would have made me very interested in the game. But the Japanese one, along with the European one, has that too, but more.

Voted for the Japanese version. The US version is nearly as uncanny as the old Mega Man covers. Also calling it Dragon Power, instead of Ball... it's just weird...

I had NO clue this game was a Dragon Ball Z game. I never played it. Maybe if I had known as a kid, I would have played it. Dragon Ball Z was one of the only anime I can remember knowing the name of as a kid.

I voted Europe. The actual art is the same as Japan, but I like that it included the in-game sprites. To be honest, I prefer the art in the US version, but it's just disingenuous to de-Dragonball a game that was made to be a Dragonball game.

The NA cover is an ‘artistic interpretation’ of the cover of Joe Lewis’ book ‘How to Master Bruce Lee’s Fighting System’. The original image was also used by the box art legend Bob Wakelin for the artwork for Target:Renegade.

Europe for me. It has the Japanese cover art (looks great), but also shows what the actual sprites look like in the game which is very anime-like. Back in the day, we'd just guess what the actual game would look like from the cover art, so including the sprite close-ups shows they wanted to show how great the actual game looked too.