LogFAQs > #949155499

#87 - Trauma Team (Wii, 2010)

I like the Trauma Center series. I reeeeeally like Trauma Team, though. If you havent played any of the games in the series, you perform surgeries on people. In most of them, they kinda devolve over time to fighting man made viruses that behave peculiarly inside peoples bodies. In the words of Egoraptor, it feels like youre fighting aliens with zappy lasers. Thats not to say thats a bad thing, per se, but they leave their comparatively mundane roots very suddenly.

Trauma Team is a bit different. Instead of performing surgeries as one person, you take control of a whole team comprised of 6 people. There is a member of that team that performs the same surgeries as before, but the other 5 are all drastically different. One is a first-responder, whose job it is to go to the scene and stabilize the patient(s). At one point, you might be juggling 5 patients at once, and it gets a little crazy. One is a specialist, who removes polyps and repairs broken bones. One is a gastroenterologist who uses an endoscopy to treat polyps and retrieve swallowed items.

The other two are more unique, as their jobs are less gameplay- and more story-focused, and are the characters that truly make this game memorable to me. Dr. Cunningham is just a medical doctor, who performs diagnoses on patients. He looks and acts like Spike Spiegel, and is given a sassy AI to help him funnel symptoms into a database to narrow down what illness or syndrome the patient might have. It leads to some incredible dialogue and very memorable moments.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kimishima is a medical examiner who performs autopsies. Except she has a phone that can hear the last words of a dead person. Look, dont question it too much. In her missions, you must examine crime scenes, gather clues, and then piece together what happened with logic. Youll then pick apart testimonies from witnesses and come up with the true killer. Her missions are probably my favorite in the game, because theyre so reminiscent of Ace Attorney Investigations.

All six characters have an overarching story that takes some wild twists and turns, as you switch between them to get to an ending that actually hits a little close to home, given how 2020 went. But that doesnt detract from how much I love this game, which lands at #87 on my list.

PS: Go check out my showcasing of this game at 2019's Extra Life! It was a big hit among the attendees!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/524668015
The Trauma Team segment starts at 55:41. If nothing else, please watch from 2:31:24 to 2:32:46 to get a better idea of why I love this game. For further recommendations for scenes, try out 3:10:09 to 3:14:26. If you have a lot of time, but not like 4 hours of time, check out my two favorite chapters in the game (they're long, story chapters), that take place from 1:40:30 to 2:29:56 and from 3:29:20 to 4:16:38.

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Xbox GT/PSN name/Nintendo ID: TatteredUniform
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