Oh yeah, I totally agree with you about the artwork. Just look at the Phantasy Star games. The PSIV North American art is so inappropriate, I couldn't stand it, I just had to make a custom cover, same with Castlevania (though I used the cool European artwork for that one). It's true though, the Japanese MD games almost always had the much much better art. I just dislike the actual layout they used, I prefer when the spines of the cases have a common template, and all the J ones just have different stuff on them, usually just spill over from the front cover. I'm also not a fan of the green and red MD logo, stylistically it just doesn't do it for me, makes me think of like 3DO christmas or something lol. I really like the Genesis red stripes template, and usually prefer the Japanese art. So go figure, I make a lot of custom covers with the Genesis stripes and alternate art.
I do like your approach of reverse localization though, it's pretty neat. I'd be pretty awesome if you could somehow translate the back text into Japanese on that X-Men cover, though I could see the difficulty in that.
I'm getting a region modded Genesis soon, so I'm actually gonna pick up a few JMD games in the near future also I might wanna use some of the localized cover too
