Review: Lux-Pain

In Japan, games are fearless and full of taboo and danger that the Western world has long barricaded itself from. Suicide, incest, infanticide, gives you the creeps right? Probably not, because in this generation we’re ready for themes like this, and if you’re me, you’re more than ready, you crave it. Tons of these games exist in Japan, but a lot of video game publishers tend to keep it that way in fear that it won’t gain any attention (Read: Sales) in other venues like the U.S. Luckily, there are publishers like Ignition Entertainment that are willing to jump over hurdles to bring us these sinister evils and “oh my’s” of gaming with their recent release of the quirky Lux-Pain.

I have to start off and say that the genre of the game is unique on its own, Lux-Pain slides into a bit of a niche genre of that is not very robust over here in the US yet, that is visual novels. For the most part you will be doing a lot of reading with the aid of anime style visuals and a few dialogue options. Do not let that lead you to believe it is just a linear story that is taking you along for the ride, it’s a lot more in-depth than that. The story leaves a lot of options up to the player and every decision you make along the way will have an impact on who lives, dies, if you will or won’t be pitted against a boss, and how the story progresses.

You play Atsuki Saijo, an unfortunate young boy who lost his family to the antagonist of the storyline, which is not a who but a what. Silent. Silent is a malicious worm that preys on the minds of those that harbor negative feelings of anger or sadness. Once it has nestled its way into the depths of a person’s thoughts, it then influences the controlled to commit monstrous crimes they wouldn’t normally commit. Atsuki joins an organization known as FORT to aid in their investigation of the worm and try to find the “Original” where it started and spreads from to prevent the epidemic of suicides from continuing. You assume the role of a high school student and are expected to blend in with your peers to continue your investigation within Kisaragi City.

At the loss of Atsuki’s family, he decided to undergo a procedure that gave him the ability to use the power of Sigma, an ability that allows one to pry into lingering thoughts as well as track down and remove any Silent you run into along the way. When there is any sort of unusual brooding going on you will be prompted to use Sigma, whether it is being emitted from a person or is a lingering feeling left behind in the environment. You’re then encouraged to whip out your quarter stylus and scratch the lottery ticket surface to reveal a worm that you will have to remove to expose some insight into the story or why a young lady character is bawling her eyes out in front of you, expecting you to care while expecting you to just know why. Girls right now are sighing and thinking, “If only all men had Sigma…” No, Atsuki may not be the Edward Cullen of gaming (he doesn’t have spiky hair), but there are definitely a handful of (cute?) distressed teenage girls that you’ll meet.

Okay, so they aren’t all crying buckets, and the cast is actually quite colorful in a sense that it is very varied and interesting. Getting down all the names of your peers will be the first task into settling in with Lux-Pain. There are countless locations for you to visit, which adds to the perk that players have many decisions to make about where to go next, because choosing one may or may not close out another location option afterward for that chapter.

Unfortunately, the game falls prey to a couple of unnecessary flaws that appeared mostly from localization issues. Now being that the story is it’s main focus, you would think it would get a lot of attention throughout the translation process but after playing it leaves the player no choice but to heave a great sigh of disappointment when you scroll through the text which is riddled with spelling errors and lazily translated and scripted. For example instead of the word “and” you will see an ampersand (&) as a replacement to save space and avoid having to use more text boxes. Another strange issue I had with the game was that although the voice acting is very refined and beautifully done, it rarely ever matches the text, and this is was a huge distraction to me. It’s not just one or two words that are changed, but entire sentences are reconstructed to the point where it feels like there are two separate conversations taking place at the same time. I’m not sure why the team deciding to do this and if the voice actors were merely trying to improve the translation through their voicework or if this was intended to come out like that. If the voice actors thought they could make it better (which they do), why not rework the sentences in the text boxes as well? It seems very lazy.

The music score throughout the game isn’t really grand or memorable, but its there and it adds a bit to the gameplay. Although there is one instance I feel worth mentioning; when you discover and remove the worms throughout the story and as I mentioned earlier, some story elements or deep feelings are revealed, they aren’t just in a boring old text box, they are displayed each time with a couple of different eerie tones while the text shatters, trickles and trembles on screen which really adds a lot to the visual and audio experience of the game.

Now the game is definitely propelled by the story and if a deep, dark storyline alone is not enough to stimulate some play time from you, then you will not be satisfied with this game. Though I know that there is a huge secret cult of gamers here that love these weird, crazy Japanese stories and that alone is often enough to get us to pick up and try a game like this. If that’s the case for you, the story is good, buy it if you like. Renting may not be enough for this one though, because unlike a lot of this generation’s games, Lux-Pain‘s gameplay spans countless hours; after I had hit around ten hours of gameplay, I realized I was almost, yes almost, halfway into it. So you know your money spent to time played ratio might just be 1:1 on that end. With multiple endings and varied paths to follow throughout your experience, get ready to invest a lot of time into this one. That’s why it fits just perfectly onto the DS so you can play it any time you want a quick fix, and there is a useful menu in-game that allows you to save whenever you have to get back to work or hop off the elevator. A very useful feature that every portable game needs to catch on to.