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.
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.