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Lux-Pain is a good story with some great problems: it pretends it has gameplay, has a half-assed localization, and muddies the waters with confusing RPG lingo. And that makes it not a very good game at all.

But there’s a nice premise and a brilliant opening movie. You’re an agent for an undercover X-Files-like organization named FORT. FORT is tracking down the source of a viral infection called SILENT… and the trail leads to a high school in Kisaragi City. Enrolled as a transfer student, you must interact with other students (and local townspeople) to find and stop the infection.

It sounds awesome. It’s like 90210 meets Resident Evil meets Trauma Center. It would likely be a sweet anime series. And the 45-page instruction manual does a great job of making you think the game is going to be insanely complicated and wildly deep. I’m the type of gamer who always breezes through the manual before I boot up a game for the first time, and I was completely intimidated as pages flew by discussing SILENT and Spirit Points and Term Synthesis and the Emotion System.

Turns out that is all complete bunk as Lux-Pain is like a clunky steam train: it’s going to keep on raging towards the destination regardless of who you talk to in the passenger cabin or what you know about the railroad scene in general. Lux-Pain is an interactive novel that doesn’t want to admit it’s an interactive novel, so it forces you through stylus-based busywork and faux choices as the storyline unmercifully advances.

I thought the opening act in Blue Dragon Plus was unfriendly to new gamers; Lux-Pain is downright murderous. I read the manual and I was lost for a solid half-hour. There’s a crime scene, someone killing animals, dread over the potential SILENT plague, and a lot about your ability to psychically sense thoughts from the people you interview. Character portraits appear, toss about keywords and then you’re expected to manage the scratching minigame that you’ll do about a thousand more times before game’s end.

Then suddenly you’re in high school, with an impossibly hot girl taking you on a tour of the grounds and introducing you to all the students. I’ll spare you all the in-game jargon (at least, I’ll spare you more of it), but the gist is, in some conversations you can use your hidden powers to read minds and feelings. To do this, you have to use the stylus to scratch away the frozen anime image and locate the moving germlike object found underneath. Then you tap the hell out of the germ until it turns into a text phrase. Drag the phrase back on top of the interviewee and you win a strange little animated prose piece (which the game loudly reminds you can SKIP with a tap on the touchscreen). This brief movie represents the person’s subconscious desires and secret feelings. Eventually, this process gets you closer to sourcing the original SILENT virus infector.

The thing is, at no point did I feel like I was actually holding an investigation. I went where the game told me to go, talked to the one person in the room, scratched at them until their text pieces unfolded, and then trotted off to the next locale. I was just along for the ride, and the interactive bit (the scratching) was more annoying than anything else.

In a very dirty trick, some of your actions DO have consequences on the storyline’s development. Mainly if you screw up one of the scratch games, or miss re-visiting a character and end a chapter prematurely. But you’ll be so inured to the game’s early tendency to lead you by the nose, you’ll likely not realize it until it is too late. Because for every serious interactive moment, there are dozens of empty text choices where you respond to character conversations with meaningless options like “I think the colors clash” or “It doesn’t look too bad.”

And you know, with a story like this, I’d have been A-OK with a pure visual novel. Quit wasting my time faking a game. The situation in Kisaragi City gets dark pretty quickly; the characters are interesting and the art is great. I want to know what happens, but if the game is just going to pretend I personally have any control over it, then it might as well just read me the story and be done with it. Don’t lie to me on the back-of-the-box bullet points that I’ll be examining crime scenes and gathering hints. The only way you could let Lux-Pain escape with that assessment is if you think the home viewer helps the TV cops on “Law & Order.”

Lux-Pain is sort of following in the footsteps of Phoenix Wright, except that at least in Phoenix Wright, you have to think your way through the trial cross-examinations. In most cases, I would have preferred even Phoenix Wright read me the story… so what chance does a lesser game like Lux-Pain have?

It doesn’t help that Lux-Pain has serious text problems. There are lots of egregious spelling mistakes. “Embarrassed” is spelled “embarassed” just about every time it comes up. And while there is a fair ton of voice work (and it’s good voice work), it rarely matches up exactly with the onscreen text! It’s totally distracting. And they only hired actors for certain characters… you’ll run across some NPC conversations where one character has a voice and the other doesn’t. That’s just absurd.

On the bright side, Lux-Pain does look very nice. I mentioned Trauma Center earlier; Lux-Pain echoes that game’s vibe of anime characters struggling against a serious, world-threatening problem. The character artwork is gorgeous and the backgrounds are detailed. The screenshots in this review are obviously from the Japanese version, but you can see how the game hits all the right manga notes. Each copy of Lux-Pain includes a great art book that I probably enjoyed more than the game itself.

It’s clear that Lux-Pain is Lacking-Polish. And also Light-on-Play. It’s a shame that an interesting and complicated story is saddled with such a tedious mechanic and confusing structure. Unless you are severely into this kind of dialogue-heavy Japan-centric visual novel, you will likely be uninspired to follow the story to its conclusion.

For a great story and interesting characters… but boring, meaningless gameplay and ghastly localization… Lux-Pain for DS gets 1.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Lux-Pain was released March 2009 (NA) for DS. Rated T

Check out Lux-Pain and other DS reviews at Test Freaks.