This is a lie!
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That was only a prototype!
Jeez, Gary what´s it with that judgy look?! He´s staring into my soul!
I forgot to mention a fun thing about versions: in the FM Towns Japanese edition, there’s a little detail that is different from the USA-Europe one…
the Hiragana alphabet?
The fish is the main character?
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Sushi is aware of its cruel destiny in minutes?
Of turning into Sashimi?
My understanding was that those character features actually exist in both versions in the game’s resources. Is this true? I haven’t checked it myself (yet).
In this pic it´s more obvious:
(I guess who captured that was unable to display the japanese character sets).
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For a proper comparison go here: http://www.zak-site.com/zak256.htm (or archive.org since the site currently being slow)
I’ve read this page some time ago and I guess I remembered the sprite stuff wrong. They say both sprites are in the original version only.
I really don’t know if in the american version there are both features of Zak. Sometimes I looked for the contents of some Lucasfilm Games, but in the directories I found files that I was unable to open. Here are my limits since I know a little more than nothing about programming. My highest point was editing the file with the options for TWP! 
All four main characters have bigger eyes in the Japanese version. NPCs are unchanged. I wonder why they felt the need to have different sprites per language. Why only the main characters? And why not just give us an option, so anyone could switch them on-the-fly?
Well it´s the big eyes manga look so I guess they think it appeals more to the japanese.
But what if the Japanese want to play it in English? The FM-Towns version was sold only in Japan at the time anyway, so the English version was clearly meant for Japanese players too. This changed only recently when GOG added LucasArts games to their store.
Also mangas and anime do have a fan base outside Japan for a long time.
That´s now more true than it might have been in 1990 (though I did watch anime in 1990, didn´t know it was called that, yet though).
I don´t know I never really knew too much about the FM Towns anyway.
Even in the 70’s, there were some very popular TV shows well known around the world:
Maya the Honey Bee
Heidi, Girl of the Alps
Captain Future
I heard of it the first time when I read about a 256 color version of Zak McKracken. I guess, most people outside of Japan learned about its existence that way.
And I watched all of those and more. Though some (like Captain Future) didn´t reach us that early. In the case of the others it helped that they were german co productions. 
Also Pinnochio, Sinbad, Nils Holgersson and to some extent I think even Alfred J. Kwak.
However stuff like the Studio Ghibli movies or Akira had no chance at the time (and I would have loved to see Totoro or Kiki as a child!) and reached us only in the late 90s early 2000nds. I think by the time that Pokemon and Dragonballl took off absolutly everybody knew what Anime is.
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Miyazaki is my favourite artist ever. At that time, I used to watch his movies on VHS in japanese, if lucky with subtitles in english, but I didn’t mind.
When Mononoke Hime came out in the '90s, I remember to having downloaded the whole script, translated in italian by an universitary student, and then watched the movie in japanese only.
So, I enjoyed the movie, knowing also the meaning of the story and the dialogs 
At that time, the Disney company wanted to import Miyazaki’s movies for the Westen market, but he refused many times, for the same reasons Mrs. P.L. Travers didn’t want to sell the IP of Mary Poppins.
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Hi @LowLevel, how is going your Zak McKracken adventure?
What have you done so far?