Box Art Brawl: Duel – Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Box Art Brawl!

For last week’s brawl, we took a look at the fantastic arcade first-person shooter Timesplitters 2 for the GameCube. Largely regarded as one of the most influential games of its time, it’s safe to say that the box art for the game wasn’t entirely inspiring. Nevertheless, Europe (or rather the UK specifically) won out comfortably, bringing in 83% of the vote.

This week, we’re going to be getting spooky with the wonderful Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Wii; it is Halloween tomorrow, after all! The game launched back in 2009 and is generally considered the strongest entry in the series after the initial four titles from Team Silent (just so long as you don’t count the now defunct P.T demo). It made excellent use of the Wii Remote, allowing playered to shine a torch in whichever direction they saw fit, making for a surprisingly immersive experience.

The box art across all regions for this game was pretty similar, all told, but we reckon the minor differences between the western and eastern designs will make for an interesting brawl this week. It’s Europe and North America Vs. Japan once again, so let’s get cracking!

Be sure to cast your votes in the poll below; but first, let’s check out the box art designs themselves.

North America / Europe

All regional designs for Shattered Memories feature the same basic image: a creepy girl sitting in a swing. For the western approach, however, the figure and swing are both adorned with icicles, indicating the seasonal weather we might be getting in the game. There are hints of some buildings in the background, along with an overall look of decay that looks pretty darn gnarly. The box itself is the standard white design for Wii games.

Japan

For the Japanese design, we’ve got the same girl sitting in a swing, but without the icicles found in the western design. Instead, we’ve got a more “obvious” indication of the snowy weather with snowflakes tumbling down along with icicles forming on the tree in the top left. It’s a darker image overall and this is accentuated further by the black Wii box, making this an incredibly effective design.

Thanks for voting! We’ll see you next time for another round of the Box Art Brawl.