Remember Operation? That weird board game with the fat guy who had all the ‘missing organ’ problems and a large, red nose that lit up if you put those organs back in the wrong way? Well say hello to Operation’s modern-day successor, Trauma Center: Second Opinion.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Operation sucked because I could never beat my mom at it.” That’s okay. Trauma Center offers up its very own brand of thrills and twitchy excitement for Wii owners that is nothing like the dark nights of your board game playing past. Through competently written dialogue, stylized manga art and ground-breaking gameplay, Trauma Center shows off just how fun life-or-death surgical procedures can be.
Truth be told, Trauma Center is, in fact, what is affectionately referred to as a “Wii-make.” You see, the original - Trauma Center: Under the Knife - made its debut on the Nintendo DS last year, demanding from players a surgical precision (get it?) with their styluses in order to earn so much as a ‘C’ rank from the game’s unforgiving campaign mode. To say the least, Trauma Center on the DS was tough.
This time, however, Atlus has you slicing, bandaging and suturing all with the help of Nintendo’s new wiz-kid, the Wii remote. The Wii-mote functions as your surgeon’s hand inside the patient during the course of the missions. By selecting any tool necessary for the job, via the analog stick on the nun chuck, players can, say, use their forceps by pinching both the A and B buttons together (mimicking the motion one would make with real forceps) in order to pry a shard of glass from a patient’s arm. Sounds a little cooler than Operation, hey? It gets better.
Being the anime-inspired game that it is, it’s not long before Trauma Center takes off from the runways of reality and into the skies of terrorists-created-super-viruses that only you can stop because you have the mysterious “Healing Touch.” Whoa. What’s that, you ask? Well according to a cryptic conversation with your hospital’s senior surgeon near the beginning of the game, the “Healing Touch” in as unexplainable property that affords doctors “unbreakable focus” and “unmatched surgical” skill when performing an operation. What this means to you is, simply, that you get to slow down time when it matters most in order to save a patient. While it does come out on paper sounding fairly gimmicky— after all, bullet time doesn’t belong in every game—it’s a technique that is absolutely necessary to use in order to progress through Trauma Center’s lengthy storyline.
And lengthy it is. On the DS, this bad boy clocked in at around five hours on the first playthrough. Mind you, that count doesn’t include all the hours put into just failing the missions the first several times, so your real time put in would have been more likely around the ten hour mark— no slouch for a portable game. On the Wii, though, all of the original missions from the DS are retained and on top of that you’ve got a shiny new character, Nozomi Weaver, and her additional side-missions that progress alongside Derek’s.
The story is largely untouched so if you played the DS version you may find yourself mashing the ‘minus’ button on your Wii-mote in order skip every bit of dialogue. If, however, Second Opinion is your first foray into the world of digitized life-saving, you’ll find a pleasing plot that not only touches on some major real-world issues like suicide and euthanasia, but also packs in a good portion of intrigue to keep the story clipping along at a good pace.The presentation side of the storyline does take a bit of a hit, though, as it is entirely dialogue-fueled and none of it is actually voice acted. Occasionally you’ll get a snippet of Derek— the main character who you will be performing most of your surgeries as— saying “Let’s begin the operation” or your nurse, Angie, anxiously exclaiming “Doctor!” when you’re doing something that may be less than beneficial to the patient, but that’s about all you’ll be treated to.
The big question is, I suppose, “does the game work?” Everything that’s been released on the Wii so far has had this question asked of it, for obvious reasons, and with Trauma Center the proof is in the pudding. Just play for five minutes and you’ll see how this game could only have been made possible on the Wii. Every aspect of Nintendo’s new controller is put to use here and it is put to use with both style and flair. The game gets you to play with the Wii-mote and the nun chuck attachment together, but the real focus is, of course, on your dexterity with the Wii-mote. Unless you’re playing on easy, you’ll find out mighty quick that Atlus forgot to program forgiveness into the game. But then again it’s not as though the surgeon’s table has ever been thought of as forgiving in the first place. Fortunately, you can swap difficulty settings between missions, or after having failed a mission, to adjust to your current level of frustration.
In short, Trauma Center is definitely something unique, challenging and, without question, worth picking up. It shows off all the best parts about playing on a system that has chose a gyroscopic controller and a nun chuck attachment over hi-def options and the promise of Halo 3/Metal Gear Solid 4. You should also bear in mind that Atlus has a reputation for only having their games published for relatively brief periods of time, so if you’re at all interested in owning a copy of Trauma Center you should jump on it now while it’s still fresh and available.
