i don't know why they didn't put a difficulty option until the sequel games but thank god for that, honestly.

has some more interesting operations such as brain surgery (well... more like brain aneurysms and not really cutting into the brain but still) and doing surgery in the dark. we even get the irrelevant mission but it's not bomb diffusing this time, thank god. it's just breaking locks and it's not as complicated as the bomb was. the only struggle i had was with the last stage. the grievances i have for this series are more plot related. it makes no sense for there to be a time skip and have the 17 year old stay 17 even though she should be in college. we also get a promising male character, only for him to be pushed to the sidelines until it's revealed that the HOA (its a coincidental abbreviation i swear its hands of asclepius) and acropolis pharmaceuticals are actually EVIL organizations. not a shocker, because it was foreshadowed in the opening and they've already acted suspicious to begin with.

even though delphi comes back, it mainly focuses on those two organizations. i wish delphi was slightly more threatening in this game compared to the organizations though, especially since the villain guy who is an ancestor of our last delphi leader, managed to make clones of his own henchmen. surely he could've made something more threatening if the story writers allowed him to.

at least the neo guilt was pretty interesting, both design and concept wise.

while i could understand the flubs for the surgery in the car, they randomly decide that there's not much supplies because of caduceus losing team members and the stockers 'forgetting' to get supplies. which probably shouldn't happen in a place where life-saving surgeries happen... at least nobody died?

there is also a romantic subplot between derek and angie which gets awkward. derek, who seemed to barely have any interest in women suddenly gets flustered over any new woman that shows up. then angie yells at him and drama between them ensues. their co-workers try to bring them together too and it makes me think about how this probably wouldn't be allowed in real life. workplaces say co-workers shouldn't date (they do anyways) but i feel like a doctor dating his own nurse may have some pretty dangerous consequences. though they seem like a pretty decent couple near the end but that's only because angie finally sees him as a human being and not a verbal punching bag. but hey, at least it's better than the options he seemed to have which was: a woman part of a shady organization, a girl who is many years younger than him, and his mentor/parent co-worker from the first game that's like 10+ years older than him.

the funny thing is that despite the romantic subplot being so pushed, there's only implications that they're together with co-worker gossip, angie saying 'the girl by your side', and the narrator calling angie a 'loved one'. i don't expect them to make out with each other, but i'm shocked they didn't call each other boyfriend or girlfriend, or (partner at least) so it's more formal.

lastly while the art is more polished and reminiscent of persona, i miss the old art style so much and i loved angie's look from the first game a lot better than this one (and second opinion to be honest).

Okay, so in Trauma Center Under the Knife 1 I complained that the game had a lack of variety, despite being otherwise a very great game. This game seems to have taken a note from the lack of variety in missions, and kind of stepped back everywhere else.

Let's start with the good. The sutures actually work as you'd expect in this game, compared to UtK1 where they just randomly didn't register sometimes. The game tells you how to use the drain properly this time. The characters of Adel Tulba and Heather Ross are magnificent additions: both great characters, and especially for Adel, 3D characters with decent motivations. The game isn't just "Fight GUILT, over and over again!" and you do quite a bit more. PGS is an especially cool twist on otherwise "normal" surgeries.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of repetition in that "more". You do two surgeries on spleen breaks, and two on arm breaks. And both times the fractures on the bones are exactly the same each time! A looot of the new content is directly pulled from New Blood (ligament surgery, no stabilizer mission, three-pronged aneurysms), which isn't inherently bad, but I feel like there isn't much this game actually does that it's own outside of GUILT mutations and Neo-GUILT.

Which isn't inherently bad. It's still a fairly fun game even with two missions that I find unfairly tight (the three aneurysm one and the one minute timer one). The other reason for this three star rating is because the story is all over the place. There's a great framework in how the game handles Neo-GUILT, and the forces of Acropolis/the Hands of Asclepius. Unfortunately, the story kind of fails at making Patrick Mercer a sympathetic figure enough to feel bad for him, even though you're clearly meant to feel that way, and it also inserts this very out of place and out of character love subplot between Angie and Derek, which involves Derek crushing on every new pair of breasts he sees (Reina and Heather) and Angie acting like a tsundere about it, yelling at him in the mid-game and then feeling bad and trying to follow him around while he leaves, while Cybil, Greg, and Mary try to hook them up. It's uncomfortable and actively detracts from the plot, a lot. Thankfully, this is mostly put away in Chapters 5-7 when things get serious and the game becomes about bioterrorism again.

I dunno. I liked this game but man there are some serious detractors from what I'd expect from a sequel. It's a fun time, but I'm kind of relieved I'm through with it.