Oh hey, everyone likes lists so here are my LTTP observations organized in helpful countdown form.
#1 Diagnostics is the best part of the game, its perfectly paced and I feel like this is what Trauma Team is really about because it does the best job of making you feel like a doctor. The actor playing Gabe has a lot of fun with his performance, and the game segments have really neat variety.
Specifically, youve got six major tasks to do:
questioning patients,
using the stethoscope to listen for differences during auscultation (best use of wiimote speaker ever!),
visual inspection of the patient,
image analysis (using real mri, ct, ultrasound and xray images instead of more cartoonish ones was such a good decision, draws you in so much more and really makes you feel like you're playing doctor)
examining bloodwork results
dragging symptoms in the computer to make your diagnosis (this is so oddly satisfying I cant even tell you why).
The key here is that you never spend TOO long doing any one task, youre always switching and things are kept snappy, which is what makes things work better as compared to
#2 Forensics is almost amazing
Similar to diagnostics, there are six different kinds of tasks you end up doing during these segments, examining the corpse and personal affects, listening to recorded interviews, examining crimescenes, piecing together skeletons, combining evidence cards and taking quizzes. The problem is that if you decide to listen to the excellent voice acting, you end up spending a wildly disproportionate amount of time combining cards and taking quizzes, while the other cool investigative stuff is over too quickly. Because there are so many of these sessions they lose their luster and some of the specific cases end up feeling inessential, dragging things out just a bit. That being said, the climax in the bomber chapter was perfect, Little Guy is my second favorite performance in the game, there were also several witness recordings that were way better than they had any right to be.
#3 The 'I've done all I can here' message is fantastic, a user friendly addition that should be an option for all text adventures of this sort. Yes it makes things seem even more linear but whatever it's so handy.
#4 First Response is a homerun mechanically, the tension when multiple patients pile up is the closest you get to feeling like earlier Trauma games. The problem here is Maria. Even though temperamental Latina is a stereotype, these kinds of characters are rare enough in videogames that I still wanted to like her. But the abrasiveness was too over the top and the sledgehammered work-with-others message was annoying and the ghost stuff was just lame. I wish this was executed better. Speaking of which
#5 Too much bad melodrama! Atlus is usually much better at executing this stuff, I dont know what happened here. Lots of cutscenes just plain dont work, things were hackneyed in annoying ways, cutscenes went on too long, I usually try to be very forgiving of this stuff but its unfortunate.
#6 Endoscopy is as bad as everyone says it is, but what is soooo frustrating it that in principle it really could have been great. The 3D exploration is actually a neat idea, but the unfun motion control, inconsistent depth perception, and bad button mapping choices (selecting and using instruments never felt natural or right, and the placement of instruments seemed designed to fuck over all muscle memory) just makes this a bit of a trainwreck. Such a shame.
#7 Naomi Kimishima reminds me of Lenneth from Valkyrie Profile, both are silver haired badasses who shepherd the dead in their own ways, is this thematic connection too weird or does anyone else see it? Naomis more sardonic sometimes and has classless fanservice features, but otherwise the kinda clinical observational distance and vignette structure where you learn the stories of the dead just seems so similar to me.
#8 Why are the character designs so poor? I had to check the credits in New Blood's intro to make sure but it's the same guy (Masayuki Doi) and I can't believe how bad most of the character art regressed. The main cast minus Gabe and Little Guy are really lame looking, also Atlus usually leaves the fanservice in hidden portions of fes-like re-releases, why is it front and center this time?
#9 the artwork during cutscenes of people in the distance with obscured faces was quite gorgeous really, it reminded me of first person character sprites from old Shin Megami Tensei games, I loved this aspect so much.
#10 Removing time limits was a very poor decision, it ends up being kind of disastrous in terms of keeping tension and challenge through out the game, this was very disappointing coming from the super fun difficulty of earlier games. And for some reason they decide to leave some time limits for effing endoscopy, the one with the highest possibility of death thanks to those horrible moving chambers, ugh. Removing tool usage limits and drastically reducing the vitality penalty for errors during operation makes things easy enough, I dont know why they felt they had to take away time limits on top of that.
#11 The decision to remove sci-fi elements during operations was great, but then they end up kneecapping everything by including lots of crazy-ass plot and character choices like
Whats the point of realism if you undercut yourself like this? It makes me laugh that despite having sci-fi and alien operations, New Blood manages to have a more realistic and grounded tone. Speaking of which
#12 The aesthetics of New Blood are still amazing, check out this intro again
If you could combine all of Trauma Teams many awesome parts with the difficulty and tone/aesthetics of New Blood you would have the game of the generation probably. If you go to the graphic designers featurettes page on the site here, you can see a prototype demo video they made of Trauma Team style cutscenes with New Blood art style and it is wonderful.
#13 I love Trauma Teams potentially non-linear story presentation, I enjoyed watching the characters intersect with each other, especially the ones who felt like they had real connections with each other like Gabe Maria and Gabe Orthopedics Guy.
#14 Atlus always chooses the worst voice actors for children. with the obvious exception of Nanako, children in their games always sounds so cloying and annoying, the low point was me actually cheering during the scene where
#15 The ambition, premise and structure of the game is amazing and deserves more widespread praise.
Trauma Team frustrates me because it had the potential to be game of the generation, but there are so many fantastic ideas and choices here and the goal of translating various doctoring activities into coherent game mechanics that are fun is such an awesome accomplishment.
I complained a lot but I really loved much of this game, its really special and its a must play for all Wii owners and it's pretty weird how no one actually talks about or cares about this game or franchise.
#1 Diagnostics is the best part of the game, its perfectly paced and I feel like this is what Trauma Team is really about because it does the best job of making you feel like a doctor. The actor playing Gabe has a lot of fun with his performance, and the game segments have really neat variety.
Specifically, youve got six major tasks to do:
questioning patients,
using the stethoscope to listen for differences during auscultation (best use of wiimote speaker ever!),
visual inspection of the patient,
image analysis (using real mri, ct, ultrasound and xray images instead of more cartoonish ones was such a good decision, draws you in so much more and really makes you feel like you're playing doctor)
examining bloodwork results
dragging symptoms in the computer to make your diagnosis (this is so oddly satisfying I cant even tell you why).
The key here is that you never spend TOO long doing any one task, youre always switching and things are kept snappy, which is what makes things work better as compared to
#2 Forensics is almost amazing
Similar to diagnostics, there are six different kinds of tasks you end up doing during these segments, examining the corpse and personal affects, listening to recorded interviews, examining crimescenes, piecing together skeletons, combining evidence cards and taking quizzes. The problem is that if you decide to listen to the excellent voice acting, you end up spending a wildly disproportionate amount of time combining cards and taking quizzes, while the other cool investigative stuff is over too quickly. Because there are so many of these sessions they lose their luster and some of the specific cases end up feeling inessential, dragging things out just a bit. That being said, the climax in the bomber chapter was perfect, Little Guy is my second favorite performance in the game, there were also several witness recordings that were way better than they had any right to be.
#3 The 'I've done all I can here' message is fantastic, a user friendly addition that should be an option for all text adventures of this sort. Yes it makes things seem even more linear but whatever it's so handy.
#4 First Response is a homerun mechanically, the tension when multiple patients pile up is the closest you get to feeling like earlier Trauma games. The problem here is Maria. Even though temperamental Latina is a stereotype, these kinds of characters are rare enough in videogames that I still wanted to like her. But the abrasiveness was too over the top and the sledgehammered work-with-others message was annoying and the ghost stuff was just lame. I wish this was executed better. Speaking of which
#5 Too much bad melodrama! Atlus is usually much better at executing this stuff, I dont know what happened here. Lots of cutscenes just plain dont work, things were hackneyed in annoying ways, cutscenes went on too long, I usually try to be very forgiving of this stuff but its unfortunate.
#6 Endoscopy is as bad as everyone says it is, but what is soooo frustrating it that in principle it really could have been great. The 3D exploration is actually a neat idea, but the unfun motion control, inconsistent depth perception, and bad button mapping choices (selecting and using instruments never felt natural or right, and the placement of instruments seemed designed to fuck over all muscle memory) just makes this a bit of a trainwreck. Such a shame.
#7 Naomi Kimishima reminds me of Lenneth from Valkyrie Profile, both are silver haired badasses who shepherd the dead in their own ways, is this thematic connection too weird or does anyone else see it? Naomis more sardonic sometimes and has classless fanservice features, but otherwise the kinda clinical observational distance and vignette structure where you learn the stories of the dead just seems so similar to me.
#8 Why are the character designs so poor? I had to check the credits in New Blood's intro to make sure but it's the same guy (Masayuki Doi) and I can't believe how bad most of the character art regressed. The main cast minus Gabe and Little Guy are really lame looking, also Atlus usually leaves the fanservice in hidden portions of fes-like re-releases, why is it front and center this time?
#9 the artwork during cutscenes of people in the distance with obscured faces was quite gorgeous really, it reminded me of first person character sprites from old Shin Megami Tensei games, I loved this aspect so much.
#10 Removing time limits was a very poor decision, it ends up being kind of disastrous in terms of keeping tension and challenge through out the game, this was very disappointing coming from the super fun difficulty of earlier games. And for some reason they decide to leave some time limits for effing endoscopy, the one with the highest possibility of death thanks to those horrible moving chambers, ugh. Removing tool usage limits and drastically reducing the vitality penalty for errors during operation makes things easy enough, I dont know why they felt they had to take away time limits on top of that.
#11 The decision to remove sci-fi elements during operations was great, but then they end up kneecapping everything by including lots of crazy-ass plot and character choices like
(superheroes, ghosts, ninjas)
#12 The aesthetics of New Blood are still amazing, check out this intro again
If you could combine all of Trauma Teams many awesome parts with the difficulty and tone/aesthetics of New Blood you would have the game of the generation probably. If you go to the graphic designers featurettes page on the site here, you can see a prototype demo video they made of Trauma Team style cutscenes with New Blood art style and it is wonderful.
#13 I love Trauma Teams potentially non-linear story presentation, I enjoyed watching the characters intersect with each other, especially the ones who felt like they had real connections with each other like Gabe Maria and Gabe Orthopedics Guy.
#14 Atlus always chooses the worst voice actors for children. with the obvious exception of Nanako, children in their games always sounds so cloying and annoying, the low point was me actually cheering during the scene where
(alyssa inexplicably nabs the super obvious teddie bear bomb and miraculously decides to jet away so that she can get blown up at the perfect distance to allow Naomi to survive. I think she had been extra annoying just earlier and her dialogue was so dumb I was actually like woohoo, shes gone finally, I never do that.
#15 The ambition, premise and structure of the game is amazing and deserves more widespread praise.
Trauma Team frustrates me because it had the potential to be game of the generation, but there are so many fantastic ideas and choices here and the goal of translating various doctoring activities into coherent game mechanics that are fun is such an awesome accomplishment.
I complained a lot but I really loved much of this game, its really special and its a must play for all Wii owners and it's pretty weird how no one actually talks about or cares about this game or franchise.
