10 Best Nintendo DS Box Art

Layton tips his top hat over a letter while Luke peers up at him, with the crooked village stacked behind them. It looks like the cover of a storybook. Europe went another way, with a golden puzzle frame and a promise of brain-teasers and riddles, which makes sense, since the number of puzzles became a selling point on the boxes of the whole series.

A tiny pixel spaceship flies up a black, starry box under a yellow logo that looks like an old arcade marquee. It looks like the games inside, and that honesty is rarer on a DS shelf than it should be.

A single tiny plankton floats on a pale blue box, with the logo above it and a few wavy lines below. That is all, and it suits a toy that is half instrument and half aquarium. Unusually, the director Toshio Iwai has his name right on the packaging, because he alone had created it.

In America, a boy in a green jacket is drawn in full colour on one side and left as a pencil sketch on the other. Europe's box, by contrast, is a grid of tiny pixel sprites under a red logo, like a page torn out of a design document. Both are clever, and neither looks like anything else on the shelf.

Shanoa stands with her back to you, long black hair streaming, while a red castle rises out of the dark behind her. Nothing on the box is bright except the castle, and as a result the whole thing feels cold and lonely in the best Castlevania way.

A grinning blue blob bounces in front of a crowd of cartoon faces and playing cards, all in candy colours. Then you read the cover text, which says "Comical – Sentimental – Death Metal". Honestly, what else could you want from a box?

Neku and his friends walk straight at you across a crossing hemmed in by black and white skyscrapers, as if they own the street. The game is set in the Shibuya shopping district of Tokyo, and the box has the same street-fashion swagger.

Kyle Hyde is drawn in grey pencil, tie loose, while a pale woman waits in a doorway behind him. It looks like a page from a crime novel, which fits a game you play with the DS turned sideways like a book. Japan's box is quieter still: an empty desert road with a single car on it.

Chibiterasu, the small celestial wolf born from Amaterasu, runs across the red rays of a rising sun with a child riding on his back, all in thick brush strokes. Japan's box, meanwhile, swaps the sun for a soft cloud of cherry blossoms. Either way, the brush look is the point, because you draw with the Celestial Brush in the game itself.

Japan's box is almost entirely black. A body in red lies in a spotlight in the middle, and that is the cover. The game follows an amnesiac ghost uncovering the truth of his own death over one night, so the box gives you the whole premise in one picture. The American box, on the other hand, puts the ghost Sissel in a green-lit city with the body at his feet, which is good but busier.