Comment by rmunn
12 hours ago
> In the process I also learned that the cover of Kirby Air Ride changed between the Japanese and international releases. The Japanese cover art features a smiling happy Kirby where the international cover has Kirby with a furrowed brow and serious look.
This is not the first Kirby game to have its cover art changed to look more serious and "gritty" for the US release; in fact, TV Tropes named a page after this phenomenon, and Kirby Air Ride is currently the featured page art at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmericanKirbyIsH... (caution, TV Tropes will consume your free time, only click when you have a few hours to spare).
P.S. Since the link chopped off half way through the name of the wiki page, I'll just mention that the page is titled "American Kirby is Hardcore".
The American Mega/RockMan NES box art is what always comes to mind for me. All 6(!) of the games got pretty bad box arts, but the 1st is an iconic rush-job attempt to make him more mature and badass: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/q/238841
The PAL, JP and US versions are soooo different. Here's the PAL cover: https://i.redd.it/1sra7fk3bsgb1.jpg
That was the first video game I bought myself.
The extreme version of this is the game Nier where they completely replaced the protagonist. The Japanese version had a kid trying to save his sister while the western version had a old man trying to save his daughter.
Japan got both versions - kid on PS3 (Replicant), old man on 360 (Gestalt).