Lux-Pain is part of the terrible epidemic that has been sweeping the Japanese development scene in the past decade or so. It seems every director secretly wants to work in the anime field, but since they’re stuck in the far more challenging world of video games with nothing but blob-eyed girls and Evangelion rip-offs in mind, they channel all their frustration and misplaced “creativity” into cliched dreck no one but the staunchest of otaku dorks would bat an eye at. I’m talking about low-tier RPGs like Kingdom Hearts, Xenosaga, Wild ARMs, Tales of Whatever, Grandia III, and Star Ocean 4. Even recent Castlevania titles, Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin especially, drank deep from the well of anime bullshit.
Not that it’s all been bad. Persona 3 and 4 used the typical high school drama setting and style exceedingly well, there ought to be more giant robot action games like Zone of the Enders, and Final Fantasy X-2, despite its embarrassing shoujo trappings, managed to be fun.
But not Lux-Pain.
It doesn’t try to hide what it tries to be at all. It immediately greets you with a flashy animated opening (complete with whispy Japanese vocals and willowy characters gesturing wildly), which tells you all you need to know about the game – it really shouldn’t have been a video game. It’s barely a game at all. It wouldn’t work as anime either, since the plot’s indecipherable. Not that that’s stopped certain shows.
Other reviews describe Lux-Pain as an interactive novel, but it fails at that too with an abundance of typos and grammatical errors. It’s laughable. And there’s voice acting, when there really doesn’t need to be voice acting and the dialogue doesn’t match up with the in-game text.
It lacks even the basics of good story structure. How difficult is it to introduce a world to players? How difficult is it to introduce your main characters? Or your gameplay?!
Apparently, for Lux-Pain, very difficult. I had to resort to the manual to figure out just what the heck I was supposed to be doing. It seems you play as Atsuki, an agent in some organization dedicated to eradicating “Silent”, a kind of worm or something that infects people and forces them to commit crimes. Atsuki uses “Lux-Pain”, a power in his arm that… extends to his eye… that allows him to see who’s infected by Silent. Or whatever. It’s nonsense. Finding Silent in people is about as fun as scratching a Lotto card. You rub the stylus across the screen to uncover Silent and move on. That’s it. At least the Lotto card gives you an illusory chance to win something. Lux-Pain offers nothing as substantial.
The thing’s a huge mess. It boggles my mind that a publisher would think this uninvolving thing should come to America, and then botch the translation to high heaven. I was so shocked at its missteps – complete lack of anything resembling a good game – that I had to show it off to friends and relatives.
One response: “Lux-Pain? More like Fux-Pain.”
Truer words, brother.
