Considering this was a launch title for the Wii, it's remarkably accurate in following your Wii remote. I start with this, because that's going to be one of the deal breakers with nearly any Wii game, so this crosses the most basic hurdle.
A surgery sim by way of anime, Trauma Center Second Opinion, makes medicine make sense to layman enough to be very easily accessible, despite the constant medical jargon being thrown around. The entire story is told in static visual novel stills, with no voice acting, and while I don't think it does the game any favors, the soundtrack is solid, and the background art pretty to look at. There's always a sense of comfort I get from playing this game, the low key nature of the story scenes is an excellent break from the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of the surgery. The narratives contained within are universally simple but a chance to see a group of people being shonen about murdering an evil sentient virus that builds a spiderweb or some shit, is one that doesn't come up often in media in general, let alone video games
And this is just about the perfect console for Trauma Center, with the series as a whole still being one of the shining examples of creative use of the motion controls, and the series never even needed Wii Motion Plus to do it. With the razor thin margins you can get by on the hard difficulties in later missions, even something as simple as the Wiimote's pointer functionality becomes uncannily compelling, forcing me to actively watch for any shaking as I carefully reattach a vein or laser a burrowing virus-snake. Later missions forced me down from hard on a handful of occasions, but there is no restriction on changing the difficulty, so getting stuck at a certain part of the story is generally not an issue. Good luck with those X missions though, shit's locked at Xtreme difficulty, lol.
The gameplay is backed up by a banger of an OST, there aren't too many overall tracks, but all of them are good, and all of them pull their weight in setting the moods during the campaign. There's a huge change in feel between Hope Hospital and Cadeceus, and it's solely through a change of a handful of stills and music. I love how much of my imagination I need to use to flesh out the story, while still being given some very basic anchor points.
You can find this game pretty cheap for now, so I'd definitely get it and the rest of the series while the getting is good. It's about a 15 hour long campaign for a first time through, accounting for failing a lot, which is pretty good bang for your buck.
A surgery sim by way of anime, Trauma Center Second Opinion, makes medicine make sense to layman enough to be very easily accessible, despite the constant medical jargon being thrown around. The entire story is told in static visual novel stills, with no voice acting, and while I don't think it does the game any favors, the soundtrack is solid, and the background art pretty to look at. There's always a sense of comfort I get from playing this game, the low key nature of the story scenes is an excellent break from the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of the surgery. The narratives contained within are universally simple but a chance to see a group of people being shonen about murdering an evil sentient virus that builds a spiderweb or some shit, is one that doesn't come up often in media in general, let alone video games
And this is just about the perfect console for Trauma Center, with the series as a whole still being one of the shining examples of creative use of the motion controls, and the series never even needed Wii Motion Plus to do it. With the razor thin margins you can get by on the hard difficulties in later missions, even something as simple as the Wiimote's pointer functionality becomes uncannily compelling, forcing me to actively watch for any shaking as I carefully reattach a vein or laser a burrowing virus-snake. Later missions forced me down from hard on a handful of occasions, but there is no restriction on changing the difficulty, so getting stuck at a certain part of the story is generally not an issue. Good luck with those X missions though, shit's locked at Xtreme difficulty, lol.
The gameplay is backed up by a banger of an OST, there aren't too many overall tracks, but all of them are good, and all of them pull their weight in setting the moods during the campaign. There's a huge change in feel between Hope Hospital and Cadeceus, and it's solely through a change of a handful of stills and music. I love how much of my imagination I need to use to flesh out the story, while still being given some very basic anchor points.
You can find this game pretty cheap for now, so I'd definitely get it and the rest of the series while the getting is good. It's about a 15 hour long campaign for a first time through, accounting for failing a lot, which is pretty good bang for your buck.