This is where Trauma Center jumped the shark for me. It is such a bizarre blend of ideas and conflicting creative directions. Though I appreciate its attempts at modernizing the aesthetics of the series and find the idea of multiple, varied campaigns based on different medical professions to be an interesting step forward, there is a nagging feeling that something was lost in the transition.

A lot of these new campaigns do away with the twitchy and arcadey design of the earlier games to instead focus on really one-note scenarios that rely more on using motion controls as their singular gimmick. That is without mentioning the scenarios that just play like a poor man's Ace Attorney without any mystery or drama.

Everything feels so much more diluted, and with the removal of varied and interesting bioweapon diseases or additional mechanics like the healing touch, Trauma Team just ends up feeling so much more shallow. This shallowness extends to a plot that can't seem to hold a consistent tone, going back and forth between obnoxiously saccharine and contrived anime scenarios, to supposedly tear-jerking drama that's too blunt to be effective. This new game, despite its attempts to be more grounded and also exciting, forgot about the delicate balance the earlier games had of engaging gameplay, and goofy yet exciting stories.

So in a way, I can understand why the series died after this game. It was a last ditch attempt to save this terminal series, but it just wasn't enough to truly make any of it last.

This game was one of my faves in high school, and I don’t feel like it aged a day, for reasons I’ll get into later. I had played some of Second Opinion but I never finished it, it didn’t grasp me nearly as hard as Trauma Team. The idea of adding 5 extra gameplay styles in a series that originally had one sounds like it would be super gimmick-y and scraping the bottom of the barrel, but it doesn’t. It successfully expands the scope of the game in a way that feels well-crafted and even epic by the finale.

Each style of gameplay feels perfectly reflective on the practitioner’s personality. Maria is always looking for excitement, so it makes sense for her to be a first responder where she juggles multiple patrons at once and works on stabilizing whichever one is in most need. Tomoe’s patience and quiet determination lends itself well to the slower-paced and more methodical practice of endoscopy, and is even reflected in her hobby of archery. Naomi’s work as a forensic scientist naturally leads her to facing her own existential questions as her rapidly impending death from terminal illness approaches, so on and so forth. It’s how the weaker forms of gameplay, such as the aforementioned endoscopy, still make a meaningful contribution to the game and don’t drag the game down, they just don’t offer as many highs. Each character episode also expands on each character’s motivations for practicing medicine that are pushed to their limits once all their episodes are completed and the pandemic occurs in-story.

I want to give special praise to the writing in the forensics chapter because of how crucial it is. It’s easy to question why forensics would even be included in a game that is otherwise dedicated to hospital staff, but it quickly becomes clear that this is the thematic backbone of the whole game. Illustrating the psychological effects of illness and not just physical, the way that affects our relationships, why someone could lose the will to fight, why we hurt people we love. It’s a series of very disturbing tragedies, far more visceral compared to something like Ace Attorney, that illustrates a small sampling of the outcomes that the rest of the cast are trying to prevent. Also, Naomi is just a highly memorable character in general, combing a strong sense of justice with street smarts, a dry wit, and melancholic fatalism. She’s somehow steely yet compassionate at the same time, and this tug-of-war of characteristics constitutes a good deal of her character arc.

Like other games in the series, there’s a fictional disease that is integral to the overarching plot. The Rosalia virus differs from previous fictional highlight illnesses in the series in how opaque it is. There’s a few common symptoms, but it manifests in a multitude of ways most often affected by whatever comorbidity is present in the patient, resulting in essentially more difficult versions of prior procedures that took place in less stable patients. Previous highlight illnesses, on the other hand, were very specific and easily identifiable based on strand, and were game-like in design. The lack of knowledge about the illness results in many tense moments during the game where both the player and characters are struggling to grasp what exactly is happening with a patient and are forced to improvise on the fly.

That segues perfectly into the discussion of its portrayal of a pandemic. The feeling of hopelessness and despair amongst the doctors is palpable in all the levels, as even the medical professionals have no idea what it is they’re facing and can only do their best to treat symptoms and triage while unable to address the imperceptible root, with no breaks and acknowledging the fact that they, too, are at high chance of being infected. I’ve danced around this, but I’ll lay it out here: yes, this is very similar to the current pandemic we are facing. While I think this was all still fantastic dramatic material a decade prior, this has only underlined the significance of it. My understanding from my experience watching other Trauma games is that none of them are as realistic in its depiction of these kinds of illnesses, and honestly? Sometimes the more realistic portrayal is even scarier. So much of medical science today still relies more on educated guesses rather than assured success, and that is reflected very often in this game when things go unexpectedly south. And the character conflicts during the pandemic, they’re so familiar to me, having worked in a pharmacy for over a year and witnessed how severe the burnout has gotten for many medical professionals. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a game that understands medical professionals as people as well as this one.

I love the gameplay, I love the cast, I love the artstyle, I love the soundtrack, I love the narrative, I love literally everything about this game. Most people would point to a Persona or SMT game as Atlus’s greatest game, but I will always believe Trauma Team is their magnum opus.

I gotta say, this game is rough.
The game is about a group of 6 doctors with unique gameplay styles doing their things as doctors. Unlike the last 3 games, which had a visual novel style for their cutscenes, Trauma Team uses a comic book style instead, and it looks pretty good, though they reuse some drawings of characters a lot. As for the voice acting, like in New Blood, it's alright. Nothing terrible, but nothing spectacular.
Outside the cutscenes, the game also has a bit of a different style than the other games, going for less realism. It looks pretty nice, and ages a bit better than the more realistic characters in the others games. I do prefer the realistic models, but honestly that's moreso a nitpick. The game looks pretty good all-around when played in its intended resolution, 480p, but when upscaled in Dolphin, seams show. I won't hold that against the game though.
The game sounds alright. Same schtick as the other games, nice, fitting, but not very memorable.
As for the gameplay, hoo boy. The game is split into 6 gameplay styles. The first part of the game splits them up like Sonic Adventure, where each character has their own campaign that sometimes intersects with the others, while the second part of the game is more like Sonic Adventure 2, where you play certain styles in a certain order. Regular surgery is what you would expect at this point, except no more healing touch, so it's pretty fun. Emergency response is a simplified, more stressful version of surgery, focusing on cleaning people up for further treatment. It's also pretty fun. Orthopedics focuses on slower, more precise movement. While it's fun at first, it's also too simple, and gets old rather fast. Endoscopy is rather boring, easy, and tedious. Diagnostics and Forensics are similar in that they don't focus on treating the patient. Diagnostics plays somewhat similar to the trial part of an Ace Attorney game, where you look for discrepancies and problems. The diagnostician is an entertaining character, so while this part is on the simpler side, it's still entertaining. Forensics, though, plays like the investigation segments in Ace Attorney, and boy do they suck. They last forever, you need to look in rather obscure parts of the room sometimes, and I overall dreaded when I had to play one.
Overall, the game is a mixed bag. Pretty good presentation, can only get you so far when only 3 of the 6 gameplay styles are consistently enjoyable. The game also has the issue of being too easy, with the hardest difficulty only being unlocked after you beat the game. On the normal difficulty, though, I only failed a mission once in my entire playthrough. However, I respect this game a lot more than Under the Knife 2, as that game reused ideas and was just a worse version of New Blood. This game, however, tried new things, and I give it props for that. If this weren't the last game in the series, I would love to see a second game that tries multiple gameplay styles. However, as it is, the game is highly inconsistent gameplay wise, with an enjoyable story. When it's fun, it's pretty fun, but when it's not, it sucks. It's okay, but a step down from even Under the Knife 2. If only this game got the sequel it much needed and much deserves.
6.5/10