10 Best PS3 Box Art

A blocky little hero stands under a logo built out of chunky 3D pixels, with a voxel castle and a dragon behind him. The game emulates the look of old 2D games in voxels, and it is a loving nod to The Legend of Zelda, so the box looks like an old cartridge game rebuilt out of toy bricks.

Joel and Ellie stand in a flooded, overgrown street, small and quiet, next to a tall title stacked in white. There is no explosion and no gun pointed at you. For a big action game of its time, that restraint is what makes it memorable.

The American box is a close-up of old Snake's grizzled face, half in shadow. Europe's box, by contrast, is black with a burning red figure and the logo running vertically down the side in red. It looks like a film poster from a design museum, and it is far braver.

Faith's face fills the top of a bright white box, with a red tattoo under her eye and a red stripe at the bottom. Almost everything else is white sky and white buildings, so the red does all the work.

The American box is a dark crowd of characters and monsters, which is fine. Japan's box, where the game is called FolksSoul, is something else: a swirl of watercolour pinks and reds, with faces and flowers drifting through it like a dream.

Japan's box looks like a page from a sketchbook: the squad crowds the frame in pencil lines and watercolour, under a huge red title. It is a perfect match for the game, whose engine makes its visuals look like pencil drawings in motion. The American box, meanwhile, gives most of the space to a single blue-haired face.

The American box shows a lion charging through a ruined Tokyo street, which is dramatic enough. Japan's box, however, shows the same empty street with a single tiny Pomeranian standing in the middle of it. The game is set in a deserted Tokyo overrun by wildlife, and that little dog says it far better.

A small boy walks along a mossy path through a glowing green forest, with the logo in gold above him. It looks exactly like a still from a Studio Ghibli film, which makes sense, since Ghibli produced the game's animated sequences.

A knight in battered armour hunches in a swirl of blue mist, with the logo in thin white script. It is cold and still, and it promises something hard. The game was so difficult that Sony passed on publishing it outside Japan at first.

Two paintings hang side by side on a dark wall: the sunny courtyard of Ico and the misty giant of Shadow of the Colossus. The Ico painting is the one the director Fumito Ueda made for the European and Japanese boxes, inspired by Giorgio de Chirico. Finally, America got to put it on a shelf.