Why is the American Chrono Trigger box art wrong?

Look at Akira Toriyama's North American cover closely. Crono dives sword-first, Frog lunges, and Marle hurls a bolt of fire at a hulking fiend that any player recognizes as Heckran, all of it in deep snow. It is one of the great game covers. Almost nothing in it can happen. Marle's magic is ice and healing; fire belongs to Lucca, and among the party only Lucca and Magus ever cast it. No amount of leveling gives Marle a fire spell.

The setting is wrong too. Heckran is a boss in a cave in the year 1000 AD. The snow belongs to Antiquity, 12,000 BC, an era Heckran never appears in. The pose, fans note, echoes the party's Arc Impulse triple technique, but that move is built on Marle's ice, not fire. Wrong element, wrong place, wrong monster for the weather.

The explanation is the ordinary one, and it is the standard documented account: the cover began as concept art drawn early in development, before the design settled, and during development the elemental affinities of Marle and Lucca were changed. The painting stayed. The game moved. It is the same story as a dozen famous covers, with one difference: the artist was Toriyama, the painting is beautiful, and thirty years of players have loved the box while quietly knowing the fire is a lie.