There hasn’t been a lot of good serious titles on the Wii, and if you are not into Mario and platformers your Wii most likely has been gathering dust on the shelf for over a year. In this month of busy triple A releases like Red Dead Redemption, Alan Wake, 3D Dot Game Heroes, Super Street Fighter 4, and the really sucky Lost Planet 2, oh and not to mention Sam and Max S3E2; Trauma Team on Wii came as a pleasant surprise — that we weren’t really looking forward to its release (do we ever look forward to anything on the Wii?), but we ended up enjoying it so much that we had to finish this game before we even get to open the boxes of the other ones.
Trauma Team is the 3rd of the Trauma Series which began on the DS, which the first game we liked but wasn’t crazy about. It is hard to put Trauma Center into any genre, for while it had the interface and look of an adventure game, it was a true point-and-click reflex arcade game at heart — it was like playing Space Invaders at the operation table; and it can get frustratingly difficult, so difficult that adventure game fans like us couldn’t (more like wouldn’t) play the game to the end. Trauma Team changed all that — borrowing heavy adventure gameplay elements from the Phoenix Wright series, especially in its diagnosis and forensics phases, and making the surgery levels of the game easy and accessible, with lots of hand-holding so that the player will always know what tools he’s going to need.
Trauma Team is great not because the surgery is fun; they are playable, passable, and loosely enjoyable at best — but the meat of the game is carried by its characters, the story, and the adventure gameplay. Naomi, the medical examiner “consulting” for the FBI, is the only main character that returns from the 2nd game (Second Opinion), and if you played that game (which we didn’t), she was a villain of sort, but newcomers to the series will likely miss a couple references but not enough to hurt the experience. The reformed medical examiner does everything from alien autopsy to Kindaichi style locked room murder investigation, serial killer profiling to CSI blood splatter and fingerprint investigation. Alright, suspension of disbelief or otherwise, we won’t question why a ME is dusting for fingerprints and doing profiling, just like we don’t question why Phoenix Wright or Miles Edgeworth do their own hands-on murder investigation like seasoned detectives. Trauma Team tells a great story — an Anime style story that doesn’t need to be realistic — the style of storytelling the Japanese is the best at. There are 6 characters in the game — all played differently — 4 of them first-aid / surgery related and similar to various sections of Trauma Center, and all 6 of the personality really differs and grow on you, each with their own expertise, ideology, idiosyncrasy, and personal anecdote. Gabe Cunningham’s diagnosis section is the 2nd adventure-game element next to the forensics phase, and they are fun, insightful, but never too difficult, which is a good thing. If you are stuck, chances are you’ll figure it out a few minutes later because there are only so many things you can try out and there are just usually 1 out of 3 locations to try them in. Though comparing X-rays and MRIs can get tedious sometimes because the game doesn’t let you compare the photos side by side and sometimes even if you were told which section to look, chances are the tumor shadows are so minuscule you can’t see them. But thankfully blindly picking choices do serve well enough to propel the plot forward, for even though the game keeps a virtual health meter on your progress exactly the same way Phoenix Wright did, you can start from your last save anytime after a game over with full health — which makes the point of having it utterly pointless, hay but who are we to argue?
The script is well written and the voice-acting is surprisingly good, the anime stills cut-scenes convey the story and its emotion well. Gabe and Naomi really shines here, with Gabe’s carefree attitude and his constant bantering with the diagnostic computer AI, and Naomi’s sections are the most interesting because they are plot-centric and mystery-involved. Naomi herself is confident, egoistically so but not to the point of not being likable, with a hauntingly shadowed dark past the player may or may not be privy to. What is memorable is the multiple choices when she is being questioned or questioning herself during her investigation — there are 4 answers to pick from and usually one of them is so ridiculous that its obviously existence is to make fun of itself, or to reference other geeky materials that are designed to make you chuckle.
The first section of the gameplay is structured throughout different zones in a straight time-line, kinda like Odin Sphere, but letting you be the driver of what you want to experience — which works well, to those who wants to know what happen chronologically it is clear as crystal, and to those who want to stick with their favorite characters and crisscross throughout space-time continuum it also provides an awesome experience — whichever floats your boat. It is not until the last few chapters, probably around almost 30 hours into the game, that you are stuck playing with the designated characters chronologically while they get together to battle this epidemic — a last boss of sort, if you think of it that way.
Trauma Team is a great game that carries an epic tale on its shoulder, and there’s nothing more we can say to dissuade you to not get this game. If you are a hardcore adventure fans unfortunate enough to be stuck with a Wii, you will be at least somewhat satisfied, quite so, for a long time.
