Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland box art adjusted due to overly detailed horse

Mel Kishida, the illustrator of various character designs in the Atelier Arland sub-series, revealed on X that the current box art for Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland was actually cropped by the developers due to an overly detailed horse taking the spotlight away from the characters.

“The horse was cut out of the picture because it was said that people’s eyes were drawn to the horse rather than the character,” Kishida said in the post, translated via Google Translate, and it definitely shows just how powerful the presence of the horse was.

The current box art of the game is a zoomed-in image of the character, evidently avoiding putting them in the center. The horse is off to the side, nowhere to be seen at all.

The cropping reduces the distraction in the eyes of the players, allowing them to focus only on the main characters, which are the two women in the illustration. Artists usually put the characters in the middle of an illustration or draw them in significant detail to help players know where to focus their attention.

Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland was released in 2019 for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC. It’s part of the single-player Atelier franchise, where alchemy is the central focus of the game.