Lux-Pain Review
Played on:
DS
There must be someone out there whose job it is to come up with bad names for entertainment properties. The kind of names that either misrepresent the movies, books and games they're meant to promote or reveal nothing at all about them. I'm thinking Ignition Entertainment hired this overpriced moniker-maker for its latest DS adventure title “Lux-Pain” which sounds more like a pharmaceutical than a game.
Lux-Pain is about Atsuki Saijo, a teenage member of a secret organization called “FORT” which is dedicated to fighting an obscure evil force called Silent. Silent isn't a dastardly coalition of villains like KAOS from the old “Get Smart” TV show; it's a worm born of humanity's negative feelings. According to Lux-Pain, people infected with Silent either become mopey and depressed or become serial killers depending on the level of infection. Atsuki's job (and yours) is to get to the bottom of a recent Silent infestation in normally idyllic Kisaragi City.
Being a teenager, Atsuki goes under cover as a student at Kisaragi High School. Like most adventure games, the core of Lux-Pain is finding out information by interviewing people. By day Atsuki gets to know the teachers and students of Kisaragi High, and by night he buddies up to the shop owners, fanatical postmen, middle-aged black widows, hospital staff, night club owners and various weirdos walking the streets. Atsuki's better equipped to do this than your average teenager. Having joined FORT after losing his family to Silent, he was given a “bionic” arm and an implant in his eye that allow him to sense Silent worms or “shinen” in both people and places and extract information from them.
The entire game is played with two duplicate views of the same scene on both DS screens. The upper represents Atsuki's heightened ability to sense people's moods which appear as colored auras. When a conversation starts, you're presented with three options: Info, Memory or Talk. These are intended to trigger different types of interaction from casual chit chat to subtle inquiry to outright interrogation. On occasion, a character will ask Atsuki something and you'll have the option to respond with different emotional temperatures like, “Cool”, “Sad”, “Angry” or “Laughing”. This makes the characters respond differently to you, as indicated by the color of their auras.
Sometimes when talking to someone or visiting an area, a “sigma” symbol will appear on screen and that means shinen are present. This is your main method of searching for clues and determining the intentions of the people around you. Shinen are located by tapping the sigma symbol and entering the search and erase modes. These modes let you see the shinen as glowing blobs and extract them by scrubbing the touch screen with the stylus. Once extracted, the shinen become labels that say things like, “Total Despair”. When tapped, these labels turn into ghostly displays of phrases that indicate the mood of the people or places they're in.
If a person is highly infected and dangerous, a battle ensues wherein you fight the Silent by playing a mini-game that's something like whack-a-mole. You damage the Silent by tapping frantically on a series of blue dots as they emerge from a gray ground. Tougher bosses require you to get through two health bars by performing slightly more complicated actions to remove the blue dots. Removing shinen and killing Silent gives you experience points that heighten your search and extract abilities. You can't control how these level though because leveling is automatic and in any case, doesn't seem to have much affect on game play.
Lux-Pain shows a lot of promise but unfortunately, fails to live up to it. The manual, packaging and presentation are really nice. Each game comes with an art book (although the adhesive used to glue it to the box tore parts of the cover off. Boooo....) and the game starts out with a stylish, cinematic intro that sets the stage for an epic gaming experience. The game has some really interesting, topical ideas too. It touches on hacking, group suicides, corporate corruption, family problems, bullying, the affect the media has on society, and more. The problem is that it takes on too much and the result is predictably confusing. On top of the main threads are a variety of sub-plots involving a scheming middle-aged woman, a sneaky wannabe spy, an over-religious postmaster and countless other mini-plots unique to each character that never come to anything.
Playing Lux-Pain I kept thinking of the Phoenix Wright series and how the game play in it centers on asking people the right questions. It seems that Lux-Pain wants to go in that direction but never pulls it off. The game marches you through every location and makes you talk to everyone, whether what they say affects the case or not. And what you say doesn't seem to change the game play at all. One of the shop owners you go to can tell how much people like you by using a “liking meter” . This implies that people's feelings change depending on what you do but from what I saw, the meters remained the same for all characters throughout the game no matter what I said to them. The conversational Info/Memory/Talk mechanism appears not to have been fleshed out either because most of the time you can only use the Info option and it triggers fairly straightforward responses from the characters.
In addition to the half-baked game-play, the character interactions sometimes are just...weird. I found it really uncomfortable when a series of desperate teachers, police women and city officials much older than Atsuki kept coming onto him. It was even weirder when a thirteen year old co-worker dressed like a hooker and a precocious eleven year old girl kept saying they were “going on dates” with him. Aside from some questionable flirtation, interactions were often peculiar due to poor localization. Subtitles and VO were mismatched throughout the game, but until the latter half, conveyed more or less the same things. Later in the game some of the odd conversational exchanges were beyond interpretation.
The final problem with Lux-Pain is the pacing and the story arc. The boss battles are scattered here and there and remain more or less the same difficulty throughout. There's no sense of building toward a climax either in the game play or the story. The final boss battle has a decent setup but is over quickly and when the story continues afterwards, it's lost any of the punch it might have had. That's probably the the strangest choice the development team made; creating a post-climax wrap-up that goes on for at least another hour.
Lux-Pain is an ambitious title that suffers from a problem called, “biting off more than it can chew”. Although the game has interesting ideas and looks and sounds good, it's weighed down by an overlong and convoluted storyline and conspicuous lack of game play.
