(no subject)

[kjorteo]

slither and I just beat Trauma Team, the latest in Atlus' Trauma Center series... er, I guess just Trauma series, now.

I really liked it, but I have enough to say about it that I feel one of those long-winded review-type things coming on.

Trauma Team is the third time Atlus has tried to make a Trauma Center game for the Nintendo Wii. The first, Second Opinion, was mostly just a port of the original Under the Knife, but it did add one or two extra features--most notably the "Z" missions, a set of "meanwhile, over here..." side stories starring cooperating-with-Delphi-against-her-will Doctor Nozomi Weaver, real name Naomi Kimishima, and her nameless Delphi assistant. It also demoted the entire final chapter (the "Sin" missions, which were basically just operating on every strain of GUILT in sequence to treat the original cultivators of them or something, basically just less-hard versions of the postgame X-missions) to "meanwhile, this happened offscreen and we will summarize it in narration for you" and replaced it with an original new final chapter that takes place after the Sin raid, in which Dr. Stiles and Dr. Weaver/Kimishima's paths finally cross. But other than that, it's basically UTK1 for Wii.

Anyway, next there was New Blood, a wholly original creation that was fantastically difficult even by Trauma series standards. Under the Knife 2 hit DS at some point, and now finally we have Trauma Team for the Wii. With as many generations as the series has had by now, minor quality-of-life improvements in the UI and such are inevitable, and I'll just go ahead and mention one of the new ideas they implemented this time: now, all operations in each of the four operation-related fields list all four special bonuses at the end of the operation regardless of whether you earned them, just with a "FAILED" or "CLEARED" next to them. That's pretty cool. Also, they almost entirely did away with the concept of time limits for operations, unless you're trying to XS them or something. Some missions still have them, but just the ones in which some sort of crisis is going down and the sense of "we need to hurry or something bad will happen" is justified by the plot. Also, the visual style for the operations themselves (especially noticeable in Surgery and First Response) has become a lot more stylized, with the goal of clarity in mind. This is further supported by untreated areas now always having little miniature speech bubble like tags next to them with a picture of the tool they require. Thus, whereas Trauma players might be used to multiple blood pools looking like one big bloody mess and requiring either memory or common sense to figure out that you need to drain them, Trauma Team blood pools helpfully look like individually-wrapped red gelatin blobs and are never without their "drain plz" icon. (Unless it's First Response where you have no drain, but... shh.) The one odd side effect of this is that all the tumors look like cut, polished, and faceted red gemstones for some reason. I hope you enjoy a little prospecting with your surgery, as there are definitely rubies in them thar patients.

Gameplay-wise, they also took a different approach to the question of balancing for multiple players than New Blood did. New Blood just let you have two fully-equipped doctors working simultaneously, and all the advantages that conveys, including two Healing Touches, and simply "balanced" that by making the entire God damned game so nightmarishly difficult that you need two fully-equipped players to even have a chance. (I personally place my experience with New Blood's difficulty somewhere around the same plane as Under the Knife 2, despite the fact that the latter was solely up to me, and the former was me and Slither together and Slither, by virtue of being quicker and more used to Wii controls, did more of the work than I did!) Trauma Team was faced with a question of how to do it this time--if they balance it to need two players like that, then the difficulty is just absurd, but if they don't, then difficulty if you do have two players is in danger of being absurd in the other direction. How do you make the same operation roughly comparable with one or two players? Trauma Team, it turns out, solved that problem through a positively ingenious method of splitting the work--the exact way the split works depends on the mode of play, but basically, it makes both players feel like they're contributing without it feeling like an advantage that they're contributing at the same time. One player given both those player's powers at the same time could do that by him- or herself with a little more multitasking ability (and that's presumably how single-player works,) but the split is fun and enjoyable. If anyone reading this wants to play this game, I strongly recommend doing it with two players, just for the social experience.

Anyway, Trauma Team, as can be guessed from the title, presents you with a team of six doctors, each with their own specialties. This translates to six different gameplay styles, and a lot of semi-separate but neatly intertwined storylines. The disciplines (and their taglines when you start their stages) are:

Surgery
The patient's life is in your hands

This mode should be immediately familiar to Trauma series players, especially Second Opinion or New Blood veterans. Same eight tools, same joystick-to-select Wii configuration, etc. The biggest difference is the lack of Healing Touch (see the "Realism?" section further down in the review) but it gets along fairly well without it. Slither and I agree that the way that two players are handled in this mode is the best and most fun to play of them all: both doctors are allowed on the field simultaneously and independently, almost as though this were New Blood, but each doctor only has four of the eight tools. Player one has access to the antibiotic gel, scalpel, forceps, and ultrasound, but the syringe, sutures, drain, and laser are permanently grayed out, whereas player two's selection is the exact opposite. (Or, if you prefer, there is an option to trade those sets so player one gets the syringe/sutures/drain/laser and player two gets the gel/scalpel/forceps/ultrasound. We left it as it was, though, as I was player two, and Slither's "draw a straight line with a Wiimote" skills made him slightly more trustworthy with the scalpel.)

This setup with two players provides a very small actual advantage compared to a single-player game in very specific circumstances--for example, if a patient starts an operation with sub-optimal vitals, I happen to be able to inject a dose of stabilizer (because I have the syringe :D) while Slither works on the gel/scalpel initial incision--but there are also a lot of areas where multi-step treatments force us to rely on each other. If something makes a blood pool after being scalpeled, and it can't be extracted with the forceps until the blood is drained, then Slither can't do anything after cutting except wait for me to drain the area for him. There is a certain degree of paying attention to what your partner is doing involved, so that operations progress smoothly without anyone being stuck due to a lack of assistance.

Orthopedics
Work your marvel with strength and skill

This is a discipline with an extremely strong emphasis on precision over speed, worrying about keeping the patient stable, or anything like that. It is just an extremely long and elaborate series of precise Wii remote maneuvers--cut things along a guideline, hold A to automatically tighten bone screws and making sure to let go at the right time so it's not too loose or too tight, work a mallet and chisel by swinging the Wiimote hard (but not too hard) while holding the nunchuk at the right angle, etc. The emphasis on "just do this maneuver and do it precisely" is so strong that there aren't even vitals, just a miss counter. With two players, control alternates between each successful step--for example, if you have to insert eight bone screws in a row, player one will do the first, then player one's controller will deactivate and player two takes over for the second, player one does the third, and so on.

First Response
The first moments are the most critical

This is basically the opposite of orthopedics--surgery with even more than usual emphasis on keeping patients not-dead while doing everything else. This is handled by actually giving you several patients to operate on simultaneously, with tags representing each one and codes for their health levels in the corner of the screen, so you can see at a glance if you need to stop what you're doing with patient #2 and switch in patient #4 immediately before #4 dies. (But don't take too long stabilizing #4; #3 isn't looking so good either....)

Because you usually don't have fancy sterilized surgical equipment on the scene of an emergency, the tool selection for First Response is different. You only have four main regular tools instead of the usual eight, but the "special" tools (the ones that stay out of the way until you need them and then appear as a special icon in the corner when you do--the bandage at the end of surgery operations is the biggest normal example) are absolutely everywhere. You probably have more special tools than you do real tools; it's absurd. Anyway, your standard tools are antibiotic gel, syringe, forceps, and tape. No drain, no sutures--remember what I said about no fancy surgical setting here? If you want to treat a laceration, you'll want to apply gauze (which is a special tool--see what I said about those things being near-omnipresent in this mode) until the blood pool is soaked up, then apply membranes (the forceps are a normal tool, but the membranes themselves come in a special tray, like usual,) then gel, then tape.

The two-player variant of this takes an already harrowing mode and makes it even more intense--it just assigns certain patients to certain players. If one of player one's patients is being focused and operated on, player two does literally nothing except sit and watch, and plead with player one to be tagged in as the conditions of those under player two's care continue to worsen. If players are uncoordinated or don't get along, this can lead to conflict, but Slither and I meshed really well and things almost always went extremely smoothly between us. We were both pretty good at keeping an eye on everyone's health, to the point where simple "oh god #3 is about to die, tag me in" crises pretty much went without even needing to be said. Most of the communication only happened for more sophisticated multi-step plans, and was quickly acknowledged and accepted by all. ("I'm going to give #4 a few more shots, then tag you in. Juice up 3, then give me 2." "Understood.")

First Response has a Lemmings-like acceptable losses limit (usually the fourth patient to die is the one that makes you fail) but I am proud to report that, throughout the entire game, we only ever lost one single patient. Even then, it was on the last First Response level in the game. Also, it was one of Slither's patients, and the patient succumbed to "fine before you start this procedure, but then vitals plummet like a rock once you do, so be ready for it once you make your move" syndrome, so it totally wasn't my fault. :D

Endoscopy
You must seek what lies within

Booo, pun. Anyway, this one is... sort of a 3D Trauma Center. You have to steer and move your endoscope around, and treat things as you find them. The controls are totally different. C on the nunchuk opens and closes the tool selection menu (the tools are all different, too,) Z on the nunchuk actually uses the tool, the joystick changes the direction you're facing... pretty much all the wiimote does is that moving it toward or away from the screen while holding A and B is how you actually move, and the cursor is where the light shines. That is the only light you have, by the way. It's such a powerful light that it's kind of easy to forget it's there--the whole field is pleasantly lit so long as you're pointing at the screen--but trust me, it suddenly goes pitch black if you ever stop.

For two players, one player gets the light function and the other gets everything else, so basically the "off" player just points at the screen so that the main player can see what the hell is going on while doing the operation. Every fifteen seconds or so, a five-second countdown begins, and then the roles reverse. Like everything else in this mode, it's... strange, and neither of us would call it our favorite mode, but only because some of the others are just so outstanding (Surgery and First Response are awesome.) It works for what it is, really.

I will say this is one mode where I relied on Slither a bit more than usual--unlike New Blood (where if he treats wounds literally twice as fast as I do, then he naturally does most of the work even if we're both trying,) it's almost physically impossible to not hold up your end in the other modes (what am I going to do, slack on closing wounds in Surgery? I have to fix them; Slither doesn't have sutures.) In Endoscopy, though, I had this tendency to get completely and utterly lost, whereas Slither has 3D maze experience from having played Descent and thus tended to be the one to actually get us places after I just stared blankly and failed to comprehend the radar until our roles switched.

Diagnostics
Your mind is the ultimate tool

Diagnostics is one of the two investigation-type modes. Neither investigation mode has any sort of two-player support. However, since there are two of them, you can strike a deal with your partner to alternate who's "driving" and who's there for emotional support and to help you figure out if you missed anything between modes. In our case, Slither was the diagnostician.

You play as the yaoi lovechild of Gregory House and Spike Spiegel, both in looks and personality--he's a doctor who plays by his own rules (which he freely bends if it helps him solve a case) and... basically that whole personality. Really, all he needs is Hugh Laurie or Stephen Blum doing his voice and he's set. It's kind of eerie, actually.

Diagnostics is all about looking for abnormalities and having the courage to correctly identify them. There are endless amounts of things to examine--patients' conversations (broken down into individual thought form so you can more easily pick out the important ones,) basically every sort of medical test ever devised (most of which involve comparing a normal image to the one of your patient and looking for differences,) anything that could possibly be examined. If you spot a "that doesn't sound good" sign in the conversation, or find a difference in the image, or otherwise see anything off, you click on it, and it brings up the now-trademark (it's somewhere between an in-joke and a private meme between me and Slither, at least) "Is this an abnormality?" with a Yes/No prompt. Calling something an abnormality when it isn't is a miss (you have a miss counter,) but correctly identifying them is the only way to proceed. It's actually quite a lot like the courtroom segments of an Ace Attorney game--progress is made by having the knowledge to spot the contradiction abnormality and the courage to say "this part right here is wrong, and that's my final answer" even if it means a penalty if you're wrong. (Yes, there's even one part where you have to use the "is this an abnormality?" mechanic on a patient's conversation to basically talk him out of something by "objecting" to certain parts of his speech.)

Correctly identifying an abnormality marks that symptom in your database. Once you have enough symptoms, the computer pulls up a list of likely candidates, each of which has a short Wikipedia-like summary of the disease, its effects, symptoms, and what generally shows up on tests of people who have it. If you see something that matches between your symptoms and the article (for example, if you have "Fever" in the list of symptoms, and the article says "patients will generally display symptoms such as headaches, fever, nausea....") then drag the symptom onto the article. Dragging a symptom onto an article that does not match is a miss. Dragging every single symptom you have onto a disease allows you to make your diagnosis.

It's pretty neat, really.

Forensics
The truth can never truly die

This is the other investigation mode, and the one I got to work the controls on because Slither was diagnosing.

Dr. Kimishima returns to handle Forensics, and--somewhat surprisingly--so does her nameless Ky Kiske-looking Delphi assistant. You would think that they'd bother to name him since he's a recurring character now (and "Delphi Assistant" doesn't work since they're no longer with Delphi anyway) but instead they just give him an FBI codename ("Little Guy") early on and stick with that throughout the entire game.

Dr. Kimishima has some sort of demonically possessed cell phone. Whenever an investigation is about to begin, it glows with an unearthly red fire of the damned as it rings, and when she answers it, she hears the last words of the case's victim. Why, how, or what the fuck is never explained. She just happens to have a demon cell phone. What, doesn't everyone?

Forensics investigations are all about going out into the field to find clues (examining the body, examining the crime scene, etc.,) then retreating to base to put them all together. Clues are presented in the form of cards, which function sort of like an inventory. On your computer back at base, you can view every card you have, along with an icon for Little Guy (hilariously, they actually made a Little Guy Mii, and that's his icon--really) in the corner. Little Guy is your go-to guy for instant CSI-esque forensics magic. If you want something analyzed for fingerprints, ballistics, DNA, or basically anything that involves any sort of analysis, drag the card onto Little Guy and he'll take it from there. Even being separated by great distances and communicating online like you are doesn't appear to slow him down--I swear to God you can e-mail him bullets you found for him to compare ballistics and such.

Anyway, you go out and click on things to get cards, then come back and make progress on the case by either dragging cards onto each other (combining clues that are related to help draw conclusions) or onto Little Guy (magic analysis) or both in some combination. It's sort of like Diagnostics, but with a slightly different implementation. If Diagnostics was like an Ace Attorney courtroom chapter, then Forensics is like an Ace Attorney investigation chapter. Now, there is no longer any sort of penalty for clicking on absolutely everything--right stuff becomes clues automatically, wrong stuff just harmlessly gives you an "I don't see anything here" type comment. Instead, the way the mode attempts to get you is by randomly asking you questions about the train of thought when you are on to something. There is absolutely no penalty for trying to combine irrelevant cards or give irrelevant cards to Little Guy, but conversely, if you drag something onto something else and it does work, you had better be able to explain why.

The other thing I really like about this mode is the questions themselves--they're multiple choice, and at least one answer is absolutely hilarious. Tragically, every wrong answer just has a generic "Argh, how could I be so careless?"-style voice clip, but Slither once said--and I completely agree--that it would be worth replaying the entire game if we could hear her actually say some of these answers.

My absolute favorite in the game comes from when you're examining a skeleton and find the femur is completely shattered. As soon as you click on that, Dr. Kimishima mentions that the femur is shattered, then says "something seems odd about that, though..." which leads to the following question:

The femur on this body is completely shattered. That's odd, though, considering that the femur is supposed to be...

• The strongest bone
  
• The weakest bone
  
• The whitest bone
  
• The tastiest bone

Wrong answers are, of course, a miss (miss counter again) whereas right ones make the screen briefly flash "EXCELLENT REASONING" and update your cards as necessary.

It, too, is very neat.

Anyway, those are all the disciplines. Let's see, what else can we talk about....

Realism?
Atlus claimed this game was "more realistic" than others, with much less of an emphasis on the over-the-top arcade-style GUILT battle operations. They were half right. Maybe less.

There is a certain degree of change to the feel of the game that is a natural result of having all the disciplines. Trauma Team has specialists to do things that just couldn't be realistically done in any of the other games. For example, did you watch the actual operation part of that Z mission video back when I first mentioned Dr. Kimishima Weaver and Little Guy Delphi Asssistant? Someone gets in a car wreck and can't be moved, so you just do improvised surgery on the spot. Fortunately, you happen to have a full supply of surgical tools and apparently can sterilize that spot of the road no problem--cue forceps, sutures, drain.... In Trauma Team that could be a First Response mission, which would be mean less pretty surgical tools. It's already more realistic and more gritty, and I haven't even done anything to the mission itself yet! Thus, a certain degree of change is to be expected.

It is true that they toned down the diseases you're up against. Trauma Center players are used to using their zappy gun to stop the aliens from shooting x-ray beams out of their radioactive supercores, and this game isn't that. It's mostly on the order of removing tumors and such, however, some of those tumors do get... a little tricky to remove due to certain circumstances, even if "because they're engaged in scalpel swordfight dueling with the player" isn't one of those circumstances anymore. There's no Healing Touch, and the operations aren't against any evil self-aware entities on the level of, say, Bythos. (Nous, on the other hand, would not be beyond the realm of this game.) In that regard, it is slightly more realistic by Trauma Center series standards. It is not suddenly a realistic surgery game. I'm not even sure Life and Death is a realistic surgery game, but it definitely is compared to this. I mean, good lord.

They also make up for the gameplay alterations with... oddities in the story. Some of the characters blatantly violate the rules by which most normal humans live by, and the game has an odd taken-for-granted way of absolutely never justifying it. I mentioned Dr. Kimishima has a demon cell phone that is absolutely never explained, right? Allow me to also add that the Endoscopy technician and her butler can teleport, and the Orthopedic surgeon is apparently Superman (flight, strength, everything.) Now, a normal game wouldn't drop things like this on you without justifying them with the plot, perhaps making them part of the hero's standard skill set and basing some of their exploits on the fact that they can apparently do that. Trauma Team, by contrast, leaves them in the realm of comic relief and they just never come up in the course of any serious dilemma in the game, which means they never have to be explained.

The teleporting Endoscopy technician, for example... if there were ever a moment in the plot where she becomes trapped in a burning building or something, then the seriousness of her powers would be put to the test. If what we have seen to this point is true, then she should just be able to teleport to safety, thus confirming her powers in a serious position actually supported by the plot. If she does not, then it proves that what we saw up to this point was merely a stylistic humor thing and she can't really do that. So, instead, that whole situation just never comes up at all. The game lives in a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane setting that has absolutely no qualms with trying to have it both ways. At one point, Dr. Kimishima, the woman with the demon cell phone, gives the obligatory rational explanation "maybe you were hallucinating" speech to a character claiming to have seen a ghost, and absolutely no one sees anything even slightly weird about this.

There is exactly one moment in the entire game where anyone's powers are ever actually relevant to the plot, and even then it was just for a quick stylistic way to add emotional impact to one scene, and was quickly abandoned once the scene was over: At one point, a young girl to whom Dr. Kimishima had become quite attached got seriously, possibly mortally wounded in a bombing. While others from the team operated on her, Dr. Kimishima sat out in the waiting room, worried out of her mind. Suddenly, her phone started to ring. Dr. Kimishima dramatically shouted and argued about how she couldn't die, and refused to answer the phone. Then one of the doctors came by and informed her that the operation was a success and the girl would be okay. Then the phone stopped ringing. A very effective way to add to the tension at the time, never mentioned again. And, again, no one has even the slightest question or explanation for their origins--the phone, the teleporting, anything. Like I said, that's just taken for granted. Just accept it; they clearly have.

Finally, I will address the dark/edgy/grim level of the game. The disease you're up against this time, even though it hasn't developed the capacity for speech just so it can taunt you while it fights back the way you may be used to in other Trauma games, is easily the worst in the series to date. GUILT wasn't scary, it was just hard. It had, what, two known victims (after counting the nameless masses) in two games? Hell, UTK2 had Operation Hades, in which Delphi activated their last-ditch doomsday GUILT everywhere attack, and it merely resulted in one single player-performed operation (a Tetarti operation, no less--the easiest GUILT there is if we ignore its UTK2 X-variant,) a cutscene saying that more operations had been done off-screen in the mean time, and an announcement that there were no casualties. That is... an extremely weak doomsday attack. Conversely, because Trauma Team has a First Response field with multiple patient support, dangerous outbreak situations actually feel like dangerous outbreak situations. Because it has a Forensics field, you will come across people who died from the disease, and let me tell you, they died horribly. My God. You do not want Trauma Team sickness; it is Nightmare Fuel: The Disease.

Conclusion

I recommend this game. Even though it's a bit more grim than usual, it's still within the realm that it can be handled, and it's worth it for the really good story. Some people probably aren't used to thinking of the Trauma series for its outstanding storytelling, but I will be the first to admit that I genuinely had emotional investment in what was going on by the time it was all over. I didn't even notice until we had won that Trauma Team is actually fairly easy compared to any other Trauma game--I was too busy worrying about the storyline implications for how bad it seemed like the situation was to notice that we almost never had any problems with any of the actual operations.

Again, co-op is the best way to enjoy this--whether it's to poke fun at Dr. Spiegel or any of the fantastical elements no one seems to notice or to share a "ohh, that's... not good" cringe when learning more about the disease, or even just to feel like you make an awesome team when you triumph over a mission together (First Response is especially good for this,) the social connection really helps.