Are Kartia's Covers the Same in Japan and America?
No. Two Amano covers, two different arguments for the same game.
Japanese buyers in March 1998 met a wall of cards: the word REBUS in huge red letters across a collage of Kartia, the game's magic made literal. American buyers that August met a person: Lacryma, kneeling with her sword under silver letters on a deep blue field. Yoshitaka Amano painted for both releases, which makes Kartia a clean example of the era's localization instinct: keep the artist, change the pitch.
THE PAIR
Rebus, 1998 · Kartia, 1998One game, two covers
Same artist · different art · different title
The Japanese cover's center is a single Kartia card bearing a white Amano figure; the American cover takes that figure's world and gives it one face. Neither cover shows the game being played. Both are selling the paintings.
READING THE COVERS
What each one arguesJapan sells the system
The Rebus cover shows no character clearly. Its subject is the deck, card after card, because in Japan the game was marketed on its invention: creation by written words.
America sells the heroine
The Kartia cover isolates Lacryma, the shrine warrior, in Amano's most ethereal register. A strategy game about grammar becomes, on the American shelf, a fantasy about a girl and a sword.
Foil and flat variants
The American retail cover prints the KARTIA title in foil. The Blockbuster rental copies that preceded it by ten days print the same title in flat blue, and their discs carry a different number, PSRM-010600 instead of SLUS-00631.
Europe went a third way
The PAL release is titled Legend of Kartia and was published by Konami in June 1999: a full third name for the same game's contents.