Zelda: Chronicles? Maybe.
As of recent Ganon's Tower, who I've come to find as a very reliable source, reported the making of "Zelda: Chronicles", the port version of the original NES titles. I was instantly excited, having played these games in the days of yore, to know that they would get exposure to a newer genneration. I clicked on the picture to blow up the box art, and I was all of a sudden suspicious. Here's the picture:
Looking at the full scale image, I found a number of very suspicious, tell-tale signs of fradulant imaging.
- The "jaggies" around the edge of the main logo. This is what happens when you edit an image, and then blow it up larger than it was originaly. Official art never suffers from this, because the images are all "custom-originals" made specificaly for the box art.
- The picturing of the spine art. On most official box-art releses this is not included, much less the back in genneral (and if "the back" side was relesed, they would never be adjacent images). As for the spine though, even if it was legit, the logo is still too close to the things supposed to be on the "back", showing that the creator obviously didn't plan for the image to be "folded" as box art pages are when inserted into the plastic slip cover (of a game case).
- The blandness and lack of variation on the back side. Look at the back of any game you own, the text is always varied, in different colors and fonts. This picture had one font, one color, and 2 different sizes. Also, the logos at the bottom are scrunched together, and one is even crooked; 2 things any designer would make a special point to avoid.
- The layout of the back completely lacks the standard form, with the number of players and applicable accessories absent from the top left corner. Also, the "Ganon's Tower" watermark on the image makes it impossible to see the serial bar code number, but still leaves open the 4 digit number on the left segment of the code. As far as I can tell there are 4 0's there. All four of my NGC games have 5 digits there.
- The genneral re-use of images. There's no new art on the box, none. Every single Zelda game always featured some new and unique art, this box does not.
All things considered, I can safely conclude that someone took a hi-res scan of one of their GCN box art pages, cropped out everything but the offical, generic stuff, and pasted to their heart's content. After taking the above observations into account, its obvious that this is the case. Also take into consideration that box art with supposed details of this magnitude, in ENGLISH, is never seen until the game is out in Japan, and nearing relese in the US. On a final note though: Where did those screens on the back come from? I remember hearing about a BS Zelda with enhanced graphics, but nothing to this extent. That being said though, the screens alone are not enough to prove this thing legit, and there are way to many flaws to take this seriously.
This concludes my forensic analyisis, Back to Classic Zelda
Want to see my hand at trying something like this? Click here. This picture originated from a theory developed by myself and Jaetei around the initial relese of the GBA and GC, which you read here.
