Trauma Team — Doctor! This Patient Has a Case of Ass Ninjas!
Atlus’s Trauma Team is less of a sequel and more of a rethinking of the beloved Trauma Center series. The focus has been taken off battling parasitic bio-weapons like G.U.I.L.T. or Stigma, and has shifted to giving the player a variety of medicinal fields to play around with. You now get to play as six different doctors, each with their own medicinal specialty, and gameplay style to boot. Some are more akin to the traditional trauma center experience, while others feel more at home in the Ace Attorney series. All of the play styles are pretty damn fun. Although I do admit that fighting heart spiders and lung bats was fun, and I seriously miss Derek Stiles, the original Trauma Center protagonist, Trauma Team improves on the Trauma Center formula in numerous ways, and is just a better game overall.
Atlus decided to ditch the whole lung bat/heart spider thing to make Trauma Team more realistic than its predecessors, and it’s true, no one here is carving pentagrams into patients to use the healing touch. At the same time your diagnostician uses a super sophisticated A.I. computer that knows all the world’s diseases. Your emergency EMT is a biker chick that sees ghosts. Your forensics specialist gets calls from the deceased on her cell phone. Your surgery specialist is a reformed mass murderer with amnesia who performs surgery to knock years off his 250 year sentence. Your orthopedic surgeon uses his spare time to dress in spandex and don the alternate persona of Captain Eagle, super strong superhero! Finally, and perhaps most bizarre, your endoscopist is the rich princess of a secret ninja clan who finds time between her deadly ninja training to shove her solid gold ornamental endoscope up your ass. I’m not making this shit up. Way to go Atlus! You really hit the “increased realism” nail on the head!
As goofy as the cast sounds the story isn’t half bad. The characters by themselves are hilarious, exaggerated stereotypes, but together they manage to weave a story that is equal parts humor, action, and drama. It’s kind of like Scrubs without all the sexual tension… unless you count Doctor Cunningham and his supercomputer.
The story unfolds through cutscenes that are rendered in a motion-comic sort of way. The screen will pan from frame to frame of what actually looks like a comic being displayed on your TV screen (so much so that you can actually see tiny portions of what just happened and what will happen in the small margins off to the sides of the screen). This boils the cutscenes down to a variety of still images with a tiny bit of movement, but it works quite well considering that the environments are varied and the characters are drawn very expressively. At many points, you will forget that the images aren’t fully animated. This is a big step up from Trauma Center’s previous formula which had nothing but repetitive still portraits (2 or 3 for each character) and text.
Trauma Team does the impossible by being a sequel that you might enjoy, even if you didn’t like its predecessors. The time limits for most missions are gone, and while the surgery missions do unfold like prior installments of the Trauma Center series, they are now only a compliment to the rest of the gameplay and not the main focus. The result is a game that is easier but far more accessible than previous Truama Center installments. There is a little bit of something for everyone in Trauma Team, and that’s exactly what Atlus was going for.
Your gameplay choices are many and varied. As I said before the surgery portion of the game plays out like previous Trauma Center games. You have a patient on the operating table and you have to use your many tools including antibiotic gel, scalpel, laser, syringe, forceps, sutures, ultrasound, and drain to get the job done. Most missions don’t have a time limit, but your patients vitals do seem to drop a bit quicker than they did in previous installments so there is still a need for urgency.
First Response is the most frenzied of the gameplay types, and requires the fastest thinking. As an EMT it’s your job to make sure patients are taken care of only long enough so that they become stable and can get to a hospital. You have about half the tools your surgeon does, relying only on forceps, tape, stabilizer, and antibiotic gel, as well as a variety of situational tools like tubes for tracheotomies. The catch is, you are handling multiple patients at once and have to switch between them rapidly to make sure they all get quick and effective medical care because their vitals are all ticking down at the same time. You can lose a patient in this mode, in fact, you can lose multiple depending on how many you are treating, but lose too many and it is game over.
Endoscopy is kind of like first person surgery. Your tools in this mode are controlled by the nunchuck which moves your point of view around the screen. Your tools will always aim at a targeting reticule in the center of the screen, so it’s kind of like surgery crossed with a first person shooter. Selecting and using your tools has been mapped to the C and Z buttons on the nunchuck as well. The only real purpose the wiimote has in this mode is to push or pull the endoscope through the patient. People have complained about the controls being wonky in this mode, but there is a secret. Switch the nunchuck to your dominant hand. Since the nunchuck performs all the needed surgical commands, you’ll want your more dexterous hand to be using it, which your other hand decides how deep you want to go (that’s what she said?).
Orthopedics is actually the closest thing to a classical game of Operation. Tools are selected for you in this mode, and it’s all about having a steady hand. When you are cutting out tumors with the scalpel or artificial bone with the laser, you have to be careful not to let tool roam outside the guidelines. When you are drilling holes or screwing screws into bone you need to go just far enough to reach a target line without going over or under. Unlike other surgery types, you don’t actually have vitals to contend with in orthopedics. Instead, you have a miss limit of 10 (5 hearts comprised of 2 halves each) that goes down by one or two each time you screw up. You can’t regain hearts, so if you screw up too much it’s over. This is the same system that is also used in diagnostics and forensics.
Diagnostics is more of a point and click adventure affair. You and your trusty supercomputer meet with patients, asking them questions and performing tests to determine what is wrong with them. Your tools range from simple stethoscopes to X-rays and MRIs, but your best tools will be your eyes and logic. You need a sharp eye to notice small symptoms like shaking legs, trembling fingers, or jaundiced eyes, or to notice chemical abnormalities on a blood test, and in the end you have to combine all the symptoms you find together to narrow down the diagnosis to only one out of a pool of many diseases. It’s fun and it will certainly give your brain a workout, but it does have one glaring flaw in that you can’t view the test results of your patient and the test results of a normal person side by side. Instead you have to switch back and forth between the two with about a second delay between each, which makes it really hard to spot differences sometimes. It’s annoying but it won’t ruin the fun.
Finally, Forensics is less of a medical practice and more of a crime scene investigation in this game. Yes, you do get to examine corpses and final effects to determine causes of death, but most of the time you are either pointing and clicking around the crime scene or listening to recordings of witness testimony. Every time you find a clue the game gives you a multiple choice question to make sure you understand what the clue means. Successfully answering these questions along with completing other parts of your investigation unlocks “hint cards” on your computer. You can then combine hint cards that are somehow related or send them your FBI contact “Little Guy” to have them further analyzed. Do this enough and your hint cards turn into golden “hard evidence cards”. Once your computer is filled with nothing but hard evidence cards, you are given one final quiz, with the hard evidence cards as your answer choices. Complete this quiz to solve the case. The one flaw this mode has is that sometimes the clues are just a little too vague and you’ll end up randomly trying to combine your hint cards rather than use any sort of logical reasoning.
As I said before the game types are many and varied but they certainly aren’t equal. The four surgery specialties range in length from a minute to ten, while the diagnosis portions can easily take a half hour, and the forensics portions can take an hour or more. Luckily you can save in the middle of these portions because making too many mistakes only to start the whole thing over would be maddening. Each character’s chapters are mapped out on a timetable in chronological order. You can either follow this order, or play any specific character’s chapters sequentially with the ability to switch to another character whenever you like. You get the most out of the story by playing through the game chronologically, but Atlus really stressed the whole variety thing to the extent that you play through 2-3 chapters of every other doctor before you even touch surgery or first response, the more traditional Trauma Center experiences. This is at about the 5 or 6 hour mark, so by the time you get there the plain old Trauma Center experience actually feels new and refreshing.
The graphics in this game are better, but the realism has been toned down even more than it was in the original Trauma Center games. Tumors look like rubies, blood pools look like globs of red pudding, polyps look like lollipops, it isn’t very graphic. This, understandably, annoys some gamers but in actuality it was a great move on Atlus’s part. Not only does this make the game more accessible to people who might be squeamish, but it also makes each medical anomaly very easy to identify, as opposed to the shady pools of red we saw in previous Trauma Center games. This, along with the new guideline feature that shows you exactly what tool you have to use and where through tiny little transparent icons makes the game much easier to learn.
Unfortunately, there is no real replay value in Trauma Team. You can play the game on easy or normal your first time through (or intern/resident as the game puts it) and completing it unlocks a third level of difficulty for the surgeries, but the difficulty level of the diagnosis and forensics portions of the game cannot be changed and the puzzles therein always have the same solution, so you’ll rarely ever go back to those chapters after completing them once. The online leader boards are gone, but you won’t really miss them. You can play surgeries in two player co-op mode, but once again surgeries are always the same the second time around, so this is really only fun if you have a friend helping you out on your first playthrough, and even then they will be left sitting on their hands through the long diagnosis and forensics chapters. When it all boils down, Trauma Team is certainly a one playthrough wonder. That’s OK though, because the game is long, very long. Not only that, but it costs less than a normal Wii game so Atlus seriously knew what they were doing this time around.
Oh yeah, and the music is pretty good too.
All in all, I’d have to say that Trauma Team is probably one of the better Wii games that has come out this year. It has a little something for everyone, and it’s very easy to get into. Sure it still might not appeal to some with its goofy anime story and puzzle-based gameplay, but Atlus, on the whole, has done a great job making Trauma Team accessible to the gaming masses out there. If you are looking for something to hold you over before Super Mario Galaxy 2, then pick up Trauma Team and let your inner House out for some fun.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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