Five favorites: European DS box art

All the way back in mid-November, I published a blog post about five of my favorite examples of Japanese DS box art. Last week, I followed it up with a similar post about five of my favorite pieces of North American DS box art.

As I promised at the end of the latter post, here are five European DS box arts of which I'm particularly fond:

1. Contact--How much do I like this RPG's European cover art? So much that I recently bought it despite the fact that buying the North American version would have been a bit cheaper. Really, though, how could I have said no to those adorably pixelized characters and that awesome, retro-tinged logo?

2. Final Fantasy III--True story: I've seriously considered picking up a European copy of this game (even though I already own the North American version) simply because of its beautiful box art, which brings to mind the classic imagery that appears on the packaging of the Super Famicom release of Final Fantasy VI and the PlayStation port of Final Fantasy IV.

3. Kirby Mass Attack--What do you get when you combine the best elements of the covers created for the Japanese and North American iterations of this portable puzzler-platformer? You get the glorious artwork that can be seen above, of course.

Let's Play: 'Which Box Art is Better?' (Final Fantasy III edition)

Did you know that Final Fantasy III will soon see another release? Granted, it's based on the rather underwhelming (in my opinion, of course) DS and iOS remakes of the vaunted series' third title, and it's about as likely to hit store shelves in the States as, say, the Wii version of Dragon Quest X (that one was a low blow, I know) due to it being a PSP game, but it's still worth paying attention to--if only for its colorful box art.

Speaking of which, here is the cover of the PSP iteration (which is set to see the light of day on Sept. 20):

Compare that to the covers of the DS versions (the first appeared on European and Japanese copies of Final Fantasy III, while the second appeared on North America copies), which can be viewed below.

Last, but not least, here's the box art that was produced for the original, Famicom release of the game:

If I were to award medals--we are in the middle of the Olympics, after all--to three of these four illustrations, I'd probably give the European/Japanese DS box art gold, the Famicom one silver and the PSP one bronze.

Do you agree, or would you award your imaginary medals in a different order?

See also: Previous 'Which Box Art is Better?' posts

Is the WonderSwan remake of Final Fantasy III finally going to be released?

Sadly, the most likely answer to that question is "no."

For those of you who've never heard of the WonderSwan remake of Final Fantasy III, here's the deal: Shortly after the folks at Bandai unveiled the WonderSwan Color in 2000, the folks at Square announced they were prepping enhanced remakes of the first four Final Fantasy games for the system.

Although the first two Final Fantasy remakes were released within a year of that announcement, and the fourth was released in early 2002, the third never followed in their footsteps. (The remakes of the first two games, by the way, served as the blueprint for Final Fantasy Origins and Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls, which were released for the PlayStation and GameBoy Advance in 2003 and 2004, respectively.)

As far as I can tell, this is the only screenshot that exists of the 

aborted WonderSwan Color remake of Final Fantasy III.

Why is that ill-fated Final Fantasy III remake once again a topic of interest? Well, late last week a number of gaming sites revealed that the game will soon be released for the iPhone.

The question is, will it be a straightforward port of the Famicom version of the game, a reworked port of the aborted WonderSwan Color version, an iPhone-friendly port of the DS version or something altogether different (such as an enhanced, two-dimensional remake a la the PSP versions of Final Fantasy I, II and IV)?

I don't know about you, but I'm guessing the third option mentioned above is the most likely, with the last coming in a close second.