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Say what you will about the Japanese (go ahead, I won’t stop you), but they love their storytelling. They enjoy a big long complicated elaborate plotline that you need a flowchart to trace, and they enjoy putting it in any media they can. And if everyone happens to have ridiculous haircuts, inhuman body shapes, and an unheard of amount of baggage…all the better. LuxPain, an adventure game for the DS from Killaware, follows these proud cultural traditions.
What is doesn’t do is provide us with much in terms of playability or quality, a confusing array of mismanaged localization and confounding believability, which muddies what might have been a fine story. It gets points for originality, but otherwise it ends up being pretty pointless.
More after the jump.
The first thing you’ll notice about the game LuxPain is that it is not a game. It’s an anime series that requires constantly pressing a button and occasionally screwing around with your stylus to watch. The show revolves around a mysterious and unexplained organization trying to wipe out a mysterious and unexplained threat by using some mysterious and unexplained artifacts that are very tenuously related to the Christian faith. Oh, and there’s a German chick for some reason. Sounds familiar?
Okay, so it’s a bit different. The modern world is apparently threatened by this virus called SILENT that causes people to do heinous crimes, and a group called FORT is trying to secretly combat it using psychic powers. Our hero, Atsuki, was nearly killed by this virus, and this allows him to wield the LuxPain known as Gawain. He also has one gold eye, because that’s cool.
So, after tracking down the city where they believe the original infectee is, Atsuki enrolls in a new school in his quest to find the host and stop the spread of SILENT. Naturally, the school is full of attractive young people, all of whom seem to own companies [??], and of course everyone has a secret for you to uncover. It’s all been done before; the only thing that threw me is that the school did not look like every other school you ever see in Japan, but it turns out that was a plot point.
The other characters are all fairly interesting, especially as you can read their thoughts and get a sense of their inner workings. However, it doesn’t reach far enough, some people don’t act even slightly human, and our hero suffers from the PC disease, completely devoid of any personality to make him easier to relate to the player. It is kind of nice that not everyone immediately falls in love with him, although they sure can’t stop talking about him. Guess there’s not a lot of traffic in this little town.
You’ll notice I haven’t talked about the gameplay, because there is none. You will not be challenged by what passes as gameplay. When you need to find out about someone, you need to search their mind with Sigma, which involves merely scratching your touchpad until you find a glowing thing and hold your stylus against it for a few seconds. After you find all the glowing things, you are then subjected to some emo poetry that apparently conveys the residual thoughts that the person you were talking to was having. Sometimes it’s timed, but there is plenty of time and not really anywhere for those things to hide on the little 2x3 inch screen. It only because hard (read: irritating) when those glowing things start trucking it all over the screen, but otherwise it’s a simple experience.
There’s also the boss fights with SILENT, which requires to tap various points on your screen at the right time, and the usual adventure game fare of figuring out who to speak with to get the event flags to trigger, but otherwise there is absolutely nothing difficult about the game, making you wonder why they didn’t just release it as an interactive novel instead.
In fact, they should have stuck with just the written word, because while playing it can be an easygoing and mildly entertaining experience, they made a fatal flaw. They hired English voice actors to speak all the important bits, but apparently gave them all a completely different script. There are huge sections where the words appearing on the screen do not match in any way the words that are spoken. If it happened once, or was very minor things, I’d let it pass. But when entire scenes don’t match up, you’ve got to wonder what the localization team was even doing. It’s the most annoying thing, and when the typos start showing up in spades, and people start saying things that make no sense whatsoever, you can see this thing was quickly rushed out the door.
It’s difficult to overlook the shoddy production quality to the core of the game, and the point of all of it, but it just doesn’t play as well or enjoyably as most other games in the genre. Adventure games on the DS ask you to imagine the circumstances, try everything, find out what is happening, while this one asks you to spaz out on the touchpad. Other games put you in the role of some detective or officer, someone who goes around asking questions and shaking down suspects, this one casts you as a quiet high school cutie who constantly has to explain his presence on the scene of the crime, which gets old after the fiftieth time. Other games focus you on one case, digging deeper and deeper until you find out the truth, this game has you running around town like a maniac, collecting pointless clue after pointless clue, and waiting until someone threatens to throw himself off a roof before resolving an issue. It’s not a very polished effort, frankly, and the idea just collapses under the strains of the plot.
The game is a pass, a valiant but greatly misguided showing from Killaware. What they are doing is kind of interesting, but they have a lot of work to do before they understand what’s needed to make this good.
Final Score: D+
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