EmCeeGramr
Member
~The characters and events depicted in this thread are fictitious. Any similarities to organizations, video game series (living or dead), hospitals, or cutting-edge medical techniques are purely coincidental.~
The year was 2005. The Nintendo DS was still seen by many as a gimmick. The much-vaunted touch screen was used for menus or minigames. Nobody could use it for anything original. Until one game came along and convinced everybody. That game... was Kirby: Canvas Curse. Well, fuck Kirby: Canvas Curse. Trauma Center, the new series by Atlus, kicked its ass in touchscreen usage from here to Dream Land.
The makers of fine RPGs such as Shin Megami Tensei and Let's Put 'Shin Megami Tensei' On This Game Anyway, It's Close Enough, had decided to try their hand at medical simulation - and they handled it with all the uniqueness and subtlety as you'd expect from the creators of Jack Bros. and Maken X.
Across five games and two platforms, aspiring surgeons picked up their stylii and Wiimotes to battle common illnesses, destroy evil bio-terrorist parasites, solve puzzles that make you feel stupid, warp reality with psychic powers, and use medical equipment in ways never intended. Y'know, doctor stuff.
Keep patients' vitals up, stitch lacerations, drain and excise tumors, inject medication, and make incisions. Trauma Center's gameplay is fast and can be brutally unforgiving on higher difficulties and later operations, especially the later X operations found in most of the games. With scores and ranks given at the end of each operation, it's easy to scream out, "Argh! Just once more!" as you come oh-so-close to getting a S or XS rank.
With such critical acclaim and unique gameplay, it's no wonder that we're surely going to hear about the next game in the series any day now.
Trauma Center: Under the Knife (Japanese name: Super Surgical Operation: Caduceus) introduced you to the world of GUILT, Caduceus, and Derek Stiles.
Stiles, a rookie surgeon, discovers that he has the power of the Healing Touch, a mysterious gift that allows him to slow down time and heal patients in the blink of an eye. He's quickly recruited by Caduceus, a branch of the World Health Organization dedicated to fighting extreme medical threats. When a death cult-cum-terrorist group named Delphi begins attacking innocents with a strain of viruses known as GUILT (Made Up Stupid Backronym), Stiles and his nurse Angie Thompson will have to do whatever it takes to unravel the mystery behind Delphi and stop GUILT once and for all.
Also, you defuse a bomb.
Doctor's Notes: UTK1 feels kind of odd to return to. The production values are far below that of the rest of the series; the art style, both for characters and the surgical theater, are dramatically different; and the extremely fast pace it shuttles you between story and operations is a bit disorientating. Still, it's a must-have game for the DS, even if you have the remake. I still prefer stylus controls.
A new console, Nintendo's Wii, meant a new way to experience surgery. Atlus quickly spruced up Under the Knife with a shiny remake a year later, in Trauma Center; Second Opinion (Japanese: Caduceus Z: Two Super Surgical Operations).
The most obvious difference, besides motion and pointer controls instead of stylus, was the change in artstyle. The somewhat cartoony looking art for characters was replaced by the work of Masayuki Doi, an artist for Atlus who had previously worked on several of their RPGs. Surgeries looked far different as well: instead of the relatively realistic look of the DS game, the interior of the human body suddenly took on a more stylized appearance. Gooey looking blood, neon colored organs, and shiny growths made rooting around a person's body cavities a bit more palatable to those with a sensitivity to gore.
It also expanded the story. Every so often players would play as a mysterious Delphi surgeon known as Nozomi Weaver... or is it Naomi Kimishima? Wielding her own version of the Healing Touch (which healed patients depending on how well the player chained successful surgical moves), Naomi's operations tended to showcase new features, such as defibrillation with motion, rotating bone fragments to set them in a cast, operating in darkness with the aid of a pen light, and more. Eventually, Naomi and Derek met in a new extra chapter that follows from the end of the original UTK.
Also, you defuse a bomb again, only this time it's a crazy future bomb.
Doctor's Notes: Second Opinion was my first Wii game, even before Twilight Princess. I didn't even have a Wii yet! And while the pointer controls never felt quite as right as beating Savato with dual styluses, SO was a welcome update to one of my favorite DS games.
An original Trauma Center game! Hooray! Trauma Center: New Blood (Japanese: Caduceus: New Blood) was the first completely original game in the series since the original.
New Blood follows surgeons Markus Vaughn (with a Healing Touch like Derek's) and Valerie Blaylock (whose Healing Touch kept a patient's vitals in place), at Montgomery Memorial Hospital in Alaska. Facing a totally new threat known as Stigma. Which is NOT GUILT. It's just a bunch of parasites named after Greek words, used by a bioterrorist group with philosophical goals. Okay, it honestly does have a bit of a difference; there's a twist regarding its backstory.
On the gameplay side, New Blood added a 16:9 mode that was missing from Second Opinion, as well as co-op and online leaderboards.
Doctor's Notes: I honestly don't have much to say about New Blood. Despite some of the improvements, it felt a little stale and the difficulty, as many reviews implied, seemed balanced towards co-op play. That, and its lack of ties to the main story, mean that NB ends up being the closest thing to a "forgotten" game in the series.
Also, its boxart was a pink cross. Like, that was it. What, was this some kind of candy game? Did Atlus USA lose the file with all the assets when they were designing the box? Geeze.
(Japanese: Medical Emergency: Caduceus 2)
Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 finally returned the series where it belonged: to the DS, bringing with it all the goodies its console brethren had upgraded in terms of production values and operation ideas.
Continuing Derek and Angie's story, UTK2 introduced new strains of GUILT, the remnants of Delphi, and a mysterious corporation claiming only the most altruistic of goals in studying Derek's Healing Touch. Derek also finds himself facing failure for one of the few times in his career, and gains himself something of a protege in Adel Tulba, an African doctor who soon becomes tempted by an offer that may come at a terrible prize.
While the original UTK switched from "normal" surgery to fighting alien parasites with laser beams fairly early on, UTK2 takes some pains to switch back and forth between the two at times. As stated before, UTK2 brings things like the defibrillator, light, skin grafts, and bone-setting to the original control scheme.
Doctor's Notes: While this may seem unfair to poor New Blood, I love UTK2 almost the most of the whole series. It's like the original game, just better in nearly every way. Still, it's not hard to see how the less Trauma-obsessed of the gaming public must have been starting to tire of the formula.
Also, how thick was that freaking door. It had like five locks on it, it must have been a foot thick.
Oh, Trauma Team.
Atlus finally decided to step back and really shake up the series. Trauma Team (Japanese: Hospital: 6 Doctors [lol]) was the result. Six doctors in six fields, each with their own playstyle. A huge intersecting story mode with more voice acting than Persona 4. And you know what? They succeeded. While a few of the modes could have used tweaking, the overall result was fantastic.
Set mostly at Resurgam First Care, Trauma Team gave you six doctors, all of whom will eventually work together to defeat a common threat.
CR-S01: An amnesiac surgeon on death row for mysterious reasons. He takes an offer to perform surgery in exchange for a commuted sentence. His skills with the scalpel are incredible.
CR-S01's sections are the surgeries you've come to expect from the series. Same basic controls, same ol' Powell method of tumor removal, etc.
Maria Torres: A paramedic with a fiery spirit, Maria doesn't care what others think about her. She just cares about doing her job.
First Response is a cool new twist on the surgery style. You're given multiple patients with dropping vitals and limited tools. Your job is to keep the number of survivors above the minimum allowed. That's right: you can lose people. It's stressful, it's hectic, it's fun as hell.
Also, mariaboobstowel.jpg.
Hank Freebird: A former soldier turned orthopedic surgeon, Hank has a sincere wish to ease the suffering of his patients. Also, he's a superhero. Trauma Center is a serious medical drama series.
Orthopedics is a dramatic change in pace for the series. Patience and care, not speed and frantic healing, are the rules of the day. Slowly drill holes to make sure you're not too far or too shallow. Cut carefully along the lines. The slowness, compared with the small margin of error, makes these sections feel harrowing.
Tomoe Tachibana: A proper Japanese lady who wishes to be free from her duty as heiress family trade so that she can follow her dreams and her best friend is a tomboy who wears yellow and green.
Oh, Endoscopy. Due to some baffling control decisions, these sections can be infuriating. I never had as much of a problem with them as some... but they're still seen by many as the weak link in the game. Investigate a patient's inner bits as you go through an incredible journey through horrible tubes so you can suck up pieces of stuff.
Gabriel Cunningham: A sarcastic older doctor with a dysfunctional personal life. Also, he diagnoses people but is very blunt about it. I wonder where they got inspiration for this guy. Yeah, well, one thing Gabe has over that shmuck is a robot buddy. Does Mr. Vicodin Popping Sherlock have a robot?
Diagnostics gets a bit of flak for being just comparing lists and objects and sounds and pictures. Which... yeah, it is. But in the same sort of way that Phoenix Wright is just looking at a statement and a menu and figuring out which two contradict. While much of it can come across as busywork when you step back and think about what you're doing, it works well if you contextualize it as an adventure game.
Naomi Kimishima: Returning to the series, Naomi switches career paths from surgery to criminal forensics. As the only one of the doctors not working at Resurgam, Naomi has a bit of an unorthodox sidekick: her former Delphi handler, now FBI liaison, represented on a computer screen as a Mii. Naomi, presumably from the dangerous work of her past, has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. She also, for reasons I cannot even begin to explain, gets cell phone calls from murdered people to hear their last words.
Naomi's sections are basically Phoenix Wright, only instead of a trial, you head back to your office to piece together the logic of what went down. It's competent when it comes to this, but it feels like it could have been more, oh, and fuck that last room. I was in no mood to do math at that point.
also how did that lady know what the disease was called
~
The Future
With the successor to the DS nearly finished with its second year, and the Wii's successor (with touch controls!) coming out within two months, surely the series will be seeing a new entry soon! Right?
...Right?
Well, Trauma Team apparently didn't do so hot despite its production values. Meanwhile, Atlus's priorities right now lie between: A) crazy OCD anime RPGs; B) underage anime dating sims disguised as A); and C) merchandising based on B). Series artist Masayuki Doi is currently doing the character designs for their latest entry in A)!
So while this series goes into an induced coma, let's all join hands and try and keep the life support plugged in, so we can be there when it wakes up again.
