Lux-Pain: a divine or holy pain.

In the internal parlance of this utterly bizarre new Nintendo DS game, the above is merely the definition of its title. Unfortunately, to make a long story short, it’s also pretty much what players will be feeling well before the end of this peculiar interactive experience. The reasons for this add up over time, primarily because Lux-Pain is so intent on making its own short story REALLY long, and forgetting to include much in the way of a game to make the increasingly tiresome narrative worth following through to its conclusion.

It’s a bit of a headache just trying to describe what this game actually is. Its own marketing materials refer to it as a “text-based adventure”, but while it certainly has a heck of a lot of text, it has practically no adventuring at all, by any meaning of the word. With only two simple minigames endlessly interjected throughout, really it’s little more than an interactive visual novel, and often a rambling, overly obtuse, shockingly non-sensical one at that. Lux-Pain, then, is not an adventure and not very good, but it is definitely weird and very, very Japanese.

The discomfort grows in attempting to grasp what the main storyline is about. Players are cast as 17-year-old Atsuki Saijo, one of the rare people with the power of Sigma, an ability to both read and manipulate people’s minds. A member of a secret group called FORT (Force for Obliteration of the Rising Terrors – thank goodness for acronyms), Atsuki arrives in Kisaragi City in pursuit of a dangerous Silent, a creature once commonly thought to be a demon but really a kind of mental parasite that infects people through their memories and emotions. These “worms” leave their impressions through residual Shinen, which Atsuki can detect in people, animals, and even places. In Kisaragi, Silent is causing an alarming number of disturbing events, from simple mischief to animal abuse to suicide to murder, and believing the city may be home to the original Silent, FORT hopes to eradicate it at its source.

Everybody got all that? I’ve left out a bunch of other terminology like psycho viewing, imprinting, zone ether, and term synthesis, as the verbiage quickly gets overwhelming, but thankfully all relevant information is available both in the detailed game manual and extremely comprehensive in-game database. Once you strip away all the fanciful lexicon, however, you’re left with a “read people’s minds, conquer invisible worms to stop evil” premise, which is potentially very interesting… and then you’re sent to high school.

Yes, instead of actually hunting down diabolical spirit mindjackers, you’ll spend much of your time chatting up your many classmates and teachers while “undercover” as a foreign exchange student. The game takes place over the course of three simulated weeks, during which time you’ll sit through pointless classes and endure more trivial social interaction than is remotely tolerable. This is meant to give depth to the game’s numerous supporting characters, and while it marginally succeeds in doing that, the approach is so haphazard and contrived that it offers nothing to the story. Many of the topics are simply inane to begin with, while even the moderately relevant ones are drawn out to the point of tedium. The game makes no attempt to hide the fact, either. I lost track of how many times someone would “stop” themselves (after carrying on at length, naturally) with a comment like, "What am I talking about? Sorry." or "I can’t stop talking when I’m with you." Then there’s my favourite, "We just met and I got all weird." Sadly, for someone with the ability to affect people’s minds, there’s no way to make them shut up.

The other main problem with the social element of Lux-Pain is that it’s so blatantly unrealistic, somewhat uncomfortably at times. One policeman refuses a little girl entry to a crime scene, not for any of the valid reasons you could name off the top of your head, but so that he wouldn’t get yelled at! Meanwhile, anyone and everyone will flirt with you constantly, men and women alike, student and teacher alike. Almost all the women in the game look like they’re about twelve years old, and they all act like it, too. An immature twelve, that is. Some of them even are twelve (or close to it), but that won’t stop at least two of them from insisting you take them on “dates”. The whole theme never actually goes anywhere, but that doesn’t stop the script from relentlessly chasing sexual tension in a kind of pre-teen Harlequin Romance kind of way. Strange. Awkward.

Most of the time you’re simply tapping through all these conversations with the stylus, though there is the occasional chance for interaction. A handful of times you can choose a response based on “mood” colours, while other times you simply select one of several possible answers. Generally you know if you’re offering positive or negative reinforcement, though it can be a little hard to tell, but it doesn’t seem to have much impact on the outcome. In a few instances you can actually present a topic from something resembling a dialogue tree, but only when prompted and the choices are always sparse. For the vast majority of time, you simply click your way through the nove… err, game.

Once the final school bell rings each day, the game does pick up somewhat, but since you meet many of the same people everywhere you go, often it’s simply more of the same. It’s a huge cast overall, and over time you’ll likely begin to grow fond of some of them, like the budding journalist who’s a magnet for trouble, the kind-hearted fortuneteller, and a young girl who can speak to animals. You’ll also wonder why some were even included, like the local postmaster who’s obsessed with a small idol, the school nurse with no evident medical training, or the dimwitted Internet Cafe owner. To the game’s credit, it does finally arrive at some compelling if convoluted plot points, even bravely confronting the player with tragedy in different forms, but without exaggeration, the script could easily have been cut in half and been a tighter, better narrative. Never is this more apparent than the many emails you get (the most memorable was the one from a cop apologizing for the drunken ramblings of the last mail) or the chatroom transcripts (a conversation about cucumbers leaps to mind, but it’s only one example of far, far too many). It’s all meant to add optional colour, which is admirable, but it ends up coming off like so much white noise instead.

A script reduction would have cut down on the enormous number of translation issues and outright typographical errors as well. While most individual words and sentences make sense, often the context of a conversation seems to be almost random. It’s as if characters are engaged in stream-of-consciousness and verbalizing their thoughts as they go. I suppose it’s possible that’s what the writers intended, but presumably something’s been lost in the conversion from its original Japanese, as I’ve never engaged in a single dialogue that resembled anything like one of Lux-Pain’s. Speaking of translation, while the text is completely in English, all of the characters have Japanese names. Ignorant gaijin though I may be for saying so, this can make it difficult to keep track of who’s who: Atsuki, Natsuki, Yuzi, Yui, Rui, Ryo, Maki, Mako… you get the idea. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t keep switching to last names without warning. The first few times someone talked about “Saijo”, I didn’t even know they were talking about me.