I volunteered to review Lux-Pain a while back, but it took forever to get the game due to an address mixup. Still, it came just in time for me to enjoy on my flight to Las Vegas. Looking back, this was the perfect way to try this game. I didn’t finish, but I think I played more than enough to give an accurate preview.

Story

This is the best part about Lux-Pain. Lux-Pain is essentially a visual novel. Ironically, while I was playing the game, I had just started a project for my marketing research class on the Amazon Kindle, and the DS experience was very much like a portable electronic book. Here’s the official plot description (which is pretty accurate):

Lux-Pain is set in historical Kisaragi City, a town plagued by mysteries from small mishaps to murders. It seems “Silent”, a worm born through hate and sadness, has infected humans and forced them to commit atrocious crimes. The hero’s parents are victims of such crimes. To avenge his parents, Atsuki goes through a dangerous operation to acquire Lux-Pain in his left arm, a power so strong that his left eye turns golden when using it to seek and destroy Silent for good.

Lux-Pain follows Saijo Atsuki as he investigates “Silent” (which is essentially powerful contagious emo). The story deals with a lot of dark emotions and harsh realities, and at first the story-telling method was effective. I actually sat through all the inner-thought portions to read what the characters were thinking, and it was kinda cool. The game kept me guessing a lot, and after a while I started enjoying the characters as well. Without a doubt, the story is the best part of Lux-Pain, although it would have been nice to be able to affect the story at more points. I especially liked the BBS topics in the Internet Cafe, because they were so silly and yet realistic.

Gameplay

Unfortunately, the gameplay is terrible. I can forgive the massive amounts of text and mostly static characters laid over static backgrounds. This is a VN first and foremost. However, there is some really pathetic attempt at adding a sort of mini-game as the main player interaction. Basically, in order to read anyone’s mind, you have to activate your Sigma ability and then use the stylus to catch the thoughts. This sounds ok in theory, but in practice you feel like a cat in a litter box. As if that isn’t bad enough, the hit-detection is poor, and so catching the thoughts can sometimes be needlessly difficult.

You erase the screen and behind the nice artwork is a dot that you have to catch. The boss battles involve having to touch more dots. Someone thought this was a good idea for thrilling gameplay, and that someone should never be allowed to design a mini-game again. When the game portion of the game annoys you by interrupting the endless text and static images, you know you have a problem. The dialogue gives you choices from time to time, but you don’t really feel like your choices affect very much.

Tilt

The voices are actually quite good in this game. Just to balance that out, however, is the fact that the text translation is bad. The voices and text aren’t really synched up that well, and this can be a bit jarring. I typically found myself listening to the voices and ignoring the text during exciting points in the plot, and reading quickly and skipping the voices during boring sections. The music is decent, but nothing special. Character art is good, thankfully, since you will be seeing the same scenes over and over again. I was slightly annoyed that you couldn’t save more often; although the mini-game is so easy that I never lost, I accidentally turned my DS off while playing by The Bellagio pool and then I had to reread/replay nearly an entire episode.

I have to give a special mention to the nice packaging, which included a small art booklet. It would have been even better if the booklet wasn’t glued so tightly to the box, though.

Verdict

If you want to listen to an audio book on your DS while looking at nice character art, Lux-Pain is a good choice for you. Otherwise, it’s a pretty boring “game”.

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