Cover Art Chronicles: Crawling Dreams

A few months back, I made a post praising XSEED for getting titles other publishers, specifically Namco Bandai in this case, passed on for some odd reason (they're pretty notorious for this). And hey, that praise still holds completely true, as they still intend to release both games next year, though Fragile is being called Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon -- that's perfectly understandable too, since I'm sure plenty of people would have gazed at the old title on the cover and said "Fragile? Fragile what, exactly?" Naturally, the cover has changed slightly to reflect this.

Looks pretty nice too, and completely in-fitting with the previous style. As for the game itself, opinions on it have been mixed, but I hope it's successful for XSEED and that people who happen upon the game enjoy it. It releases early next year.

XSEED is also releasing The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces for Wii early next year as well. It's a game created with the assistance of Namco's much-vaunted Project Aces -- you know, the Ace Combat guys -- and also based on the Mamoru Oshii anime movie of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of a novel. Like Fragile, they've also changed the cover to this game (though not the name). Unlike Fragile, it's definitely not for the better.



Really, I don't know what they were thinking here. Perhaps the last cover was too good. So good, in fact, that they decided that if it looked like a piece of random shovelware, it would sell better. Baffling! That sounds like the same line of thought that went into The Wizard of OZ: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road's cover, and from the sounds of it, it really didn't work in its favor. Though it admittedly is a lot easier to spot shovelware on Wii, it's reputation has been soiled in the last year or so. Also, third-party games are a pretty hard sell on Wii, to the chagrin of dedicated gamers everywhere who own the system -- though some niche titles (Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core) have managed to beat that stigma. So, what gives?

Look, I'd really like for XSeed to be successful -- especially when they have their titles swept from right under their feet -- but it's tough to defend decisions like this. It would have been best to adhere to the recent Atlus standard of merely using the Japanese cover for the American version (unless they think they can improve it), especially since this is the audience they're aiming towards with both of these titles. It's not too late to change it though! Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of faith in that happening.