A series exploring Japanese video game magazine advertisements
OH SFC! SNES!
1. Might and Magic II
The oil-painted illustration carries this ad almost entirely: a warrior couple locked in combat against a three-headed dragon, rendered with a weight and seriousness that slows you down mid-page.
This was the Super Famicom port of one of North America's defining PC RPGs, and it carried that pedigree honestly. The freedom of movement and the sprawling, century-spanning scale that Western RPGs were known for made it across intact. Whether that uncompromising, dead-serious tone translated well to a Japanese console audience used to friendlier fantasy is a separate question, but the ad certainly wasn't hedging its bets.
2. Alien vs. Predator / Burai: Hachigoku no Yuusha Densetsu
Alien vs. Predator takes two of sci-fi horror's most iconic creatures and drenches them in dark, heavy tones. This wasn't Capcom's familiar arcade-style side-scroller. The pitch here leaned closer to a fighting game, putting players in the Predator's shoes as they hunted Aliens through a tense, close-quarters exchange of blows.
Burai: Hachigoku no Yuusha Densetsu, by contrast, is vivid, expressive character art from the first frame. Eight protagonists each work through their own individual storylines before converging into one, an unusual omnibus structure for the time. Hard sci-fi and glossy Japanimation-style fantasy sit on the same page without much friction, which says something about how loose the genre boundaries still were in 1992.
3. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Vol. 1
Long before the films brought Tolkien to the mainstream, this title translated the novel's atmosphere into a quarter-view action RPG. Gandalf squares off against the Balrog in the mines of Moria, lit by a dramatic wash of burning red, and the illustration captures the classic weight of the source material almost perfectly.
The game itself followed the hobbits' journey out of the Shire, leaning heavily on puzzle-solving with a difficulty curve that ran genuinely punishing. Plenty of players who picked it up on the strength of that Moria illustration alone never made it past the first few areas
4. Sonic Wings
A pilot's silhouette rises into the cockpit beneath a huge, metallic-lettered title logo. It's a simple composition, but a striking one. This was the Super Famicom port of a game that had already been a massive hit as a vertical-scrolling shooter in arcades.
Down at the bottom, eight pilots representing four different nations, idols, ninjas, Vikings among them, each piloted a completely different aircraft with its own distinct attack pattern. The port kept enough of the arcade original's feel that shooter fans could set up shop at home without missing much of anything
All promotional images used in this review are sourced from 1990s video game magazine advertisements for review and commentary purposes.
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