Maybe I just have anime brainrot but I honestly love how insane and over the top the trauma center games are. The first few missions are standard surgery stuff, fixing broken bones etc, and by the end you're stopping time to kill a flaming spider inside someone's heart.

The plot follows Derek Stiles, the most generically designed man in the world on his quest to cure all disease. Pretty soon we learn he's actually the descendent of the god of healing or something and can slow down time. This comes in handy when bio-terrorists release genetically modified disease called GUILT to the general population and only YOU can stop them. Standard anime stuff.

Super challenging gameplay, you WILL need to master the mechanics and learn to juggle attacking the guilt, managing vitals, healing wounds, and watching the time limit to beat this game. The DS screen is the size of a postit note so this can get frustrating at times, be warned. (high point for me was doing the first optional post-game mission and almost immediately getting so many cuts on screen the game lagged to a standstill. This actually made it easier to manage vitals since the game was so much slower!)

I love how bizarre the guilt are, each one looks like some kind of alien organism and it's actually horrifying to think about these things crawling around inside your patients. Each one requires a different strategy and it keeps the game fresh: triti is setup like a puzzle, requiring precise removal or else you'll trigger new growth, pempti requires you to play a game of Galaga in someone's lungs before you can attack it's core, etc. It's super weird and otherworldly and I loved each one (except triti. fuck triangles). Definitely the main draw of the game, and each time you discover a new one is an anxiety-inducing race to figure out the strategy before it kills the patient.

Overall if you can handle anime nonsense and like challenging arcady gameplay? This is the game for you. If you're looking for a more realistic surgery sim you probably won't enjoy this, the normal operations quickly take a backseat to the guilt missions.

Also you defuse a bomb

Still pretty solid. Gameplay is pretty novel; arcade-y surgery is shockingly fun and addicting, and there's quite a decent amount of variety to the missions... for the first half of the game. Story is off the rails, characters are mostly written well.

The game does start to struggle once the main antagonist appears. By Chapter 4 onward, your operations will almost exclusively become GUILT treatment, and the difficulty curve can become pretty frustrating if you're not on top of things. Triti fucking sucks ass.

I really would like to recommend this game due to its nice story and concept(medical ace attorney basically) but from the half of the game onwards the difficulty curve just booms to the top, maybe I had too much difficulty due to the mobile emulator because the game needs great speed and precision that I think it's only possible with the stylus or maybe with the mouse on a PC emulator, but with your index finger itself it's just not doable. Even ignoring this there's an extreme bullshit on the last stage of the game, in which you must not use your special ability, otherwise by the end of the stage you won't be able to finish it, making you replay the hardest stage of the game again, which for me is peak bad game design

One of the most stressful times I've had with a game in a while, and also maybe the most I've had to persevere through a playthrough in order to make it through some of the harder surgeries you have to do in this game. It is pretty fucking hard for a game without any difficulty settings (or, well, ANY settings, to be fair). To its credit, it does a good job, in that sense, simulating the life of a surgeon; getting you in a pressuring environment and in a stressed mindsight. Then, to its detriment, it does a really poor job in almost every other aspect.

The game takes a lot of liberties in simulating medical practice, both to simplify gameplay, I imagine, but also to simplify writing. Having this take place in a not-so-distant future (2018, lol) where nearly all diseases are cured just takes away a lot of grounding I think this game may have needed. In some chapters, it attempts to humanize patients you'll only know for about 20 minutes of gameplay, each, if that, but the writing is just not doing the work in order to make these virtual bodies that you're cutting up feel anymore than just that.

Then, once the plot about fighting off a terrorist-developed parasite named G.U.I.L.T. (exactly what I'd expect from an Atlus medical drama), the less and less important your patients' humanity becomes. So, it's not well-written enough to be an interesting medical drama that uses this exceptional medium of touch controls in order to experiment with dramatized surgeon simulation. But, also, it's a little too finicky to be a fun game. Each level's difficulty ranges wildly, in my experience. I would also struggle through all five minutes of a surgery only to try it again and finish pretty quickly, which, while I can't exactly say how, makes me think the level design is just a little off. There were just many times where I couldn't quite figure out how "correctly" I was doing something.

A lot of this game just feels off, in that way. While I do think it was an interesting and fun playthrough, as the levels that were well designed did feel so satisfying and accomplishing to finish, this is definitely a rough cut. I am very interested in what some of the newer installments of this series do, if anything, to smooth things out. Also, this was hard with touch controls, what the hell does a Wii version of this game feel like?

Also, what kind of surgeon is Derek Stiles? Ignore the fact that he is somehow 26-years-old and has finished residency in what is obviously a fictional version of Los Angeles, California, USA. This young man performs, just out of residency, general surgery, pediatric surgery, cardiac surgery, and trauma surgery. All four of which require four separate board certifications for, and, thus, require around 3-5 years of training each. Just thought that was a funny hint as to how intensive the scenario writers bothered to understand the medical field, lol.

A game about being surgically precise somehow manages to feel like you're handling the tools with oven mitts.

There's some goofy strawmen going on in the narrative too, no, Atlus, "I am a doctor who kills patients in their sleep without their consent" is not a good representation for a pro-euthanasia side, that's murder, actually.

That said there's a mission where you do a surgery on a bomb to disarm it and that redeems it a fair bit I think.

yeah the story is stupid SO WHAT this is so fun! a game with SHMUP mentality of tearing your guts out and asking if you're tough enough to try again. the only thing it promises is the level will be under 5 minutes for 99% of the game. sometimes the touch screen mechanics make you feel like God and sometimes you have no idea what exact pixel motion the game expects of you. this is absolutely a flawed game, but it's made from passion. the story was absolutely an afterthought and it's amazing how quickly it devolves into "what?" but i just pretended i was playing touhou and everything felt okay. derek stiles is himbo-coded btw