Lux Pain on Nintendo DS, translated into English.
Haven’t played it. Probably will give it a run unless I’m told otherwise. Georgian Chant theme song is awesome at least (EDIT: turns out that music isn’t on the DS… it’s only for the site or something).
Anyone know anything about it? Crap? Not crap?
Someone told me the English VA’ing is actually fairly decent and consistant…
It’s definitely not the shallow end of the VN swimming pool. You are thrown right into events with little guide from the game on how you run the stylus-events inbetween the story parts – one of the few games you will want to read the manual for before playing too much. No h-scenes but there is a relationship element based upon which characters you interact with and how you do so. Yes there are major scenes and psychic ‘battles’ that move the story forward, but there is quite a bit of non-linearity (you can decline to participate in events with particular classmates leaving time to run across others).
The VA work is quite good but the game has editing issues. Not as bad as some of MGs stuff but you will notice spelling and tense errors plus other parts that just don’t read ‘right’. It can detract in that as noted the game is not exactly forthcoming with its guidance. I believe ignition may have just used the euro translation done by rising star so that’s perhaps one reason it reads a little rough for a speaker of good “American”.
All in all there are more positives than negatives for a devotee of VNs. I’d put it somewhere in the 77-82 range on a classic 100 point scale although I will admit those who cringe at the editing stuff may deem it less. Lux Pain is a long game – I’ve heard it can be 15-20 hours, I am in the 3-4 hour range and am about 25% through so I’d suspect thats a close call. Very dark and serious – an evil created in the heart of humanity sort of storyline.
The publishing of this and the rerelease of a cleaned up Jake Hunter makes me feel positive about these games at least starting to make an imprint in the western market. Supposedly we are getting both the Trace Memory game for the Wii and Cing’s next DS title too-- the title of that one at the time escapes me. The Phoenix Wright sidegame with his prosecutor friend is coming over as well.
RPGFan, which is a niche site that sometimes reviews visual novels, had a surprisingly positive review for Lux-Pain. (The same site also had positive things to say about the often-negatively-reviewed PS2 game Chulip.)
I bought Lux-Pain. It got off to a bad start with some really inconsistent mouth movements. If one character is way off and one character is accurate, that’s kind of a negative sign.
I’m at the last chapter (I think) of Time Hollow now… the plot/interface are STILL stupid, but the story is at least vaguely interesting when playing from a walkthrough. Once I finish it, I may look for Lux Pain…
Well, niche adventures are mainly reviewed by one guy, and to be fair, he seems to rate everything highly unless a game is particularly awful. Of the eight DS games covered, all but one received a score of over 80% (i.e. abysmal games like Lifesigns: Surgical Unit are only one or two points away from A-caliber titles like Layton…it’s almost as if the scale ranges from 82-86 instead of 0-100). The same goes for his PC/DVD game reviews.
Hmmm… visual novel-ish game in the works by Square Enix for DS:
No word if an English release is even in the cards, but maybe we could hope. DS seems to be a somewhat profitable venture for the material.
Gravedig i know, but i got the game the other day on heavy discount from Best Buy to try out. I haveto agree with most of RPGFan, except VA’s quality. While its better than the text, it’s still poor quality. I quickly went and got a way to play the game in English with Japanese VAs and it was much better inspite of the clumsy dialogue.
I will have to say most of the negative reviews out there seem to be biased against it for some reason beyond the dialouge and lack of learning curve (although TBH people should read manuals so i have little sympathy there). I compare it to Ace Attorney and Trauma Center games and the reviews seem to want to just slam it more because the gameplay isn’t something they particularly like rather than review it for what it is; a VN with some minor gameplay elements added.
RPGFan has the score about right it’s not a great game, but its not terrible. It probably would have done better had marvelous gone with XSEED or even Natsume. TBH though other than the grammatical errors, spelling errors like lack of articles, he/she pronoun swaps, etc. it wasn’t that difficult to follow; the hardest part was figuring out if this took place in the US or Japan because of the reference switches; it looks like early on they wanted to go with Japan and later they may have wanted to go with US. I base this on the VAing; English VAs usually refer US names when there is a conflict and the text refers to Japanese names. Given the low number of VN type games out there, even with its poor quality, i expect within 5-10 years this game will become a cult item of moderate value (more than what i paid for it). I base this on other such games released in the US.
I’m surprised I never heard of this. I might get this. Too bad I don’t know how to switch to the Japanese VAs. If only someone would PM me the details… 