Trauma Center: Second Opinion Review

Even in these bug-hunting operations, though, Trauma Center still succeeds thanks to its great uses of the Wii remote and nunchuck. The remote acts as a pointer. With it, you can make incisions and stitch up cuts with flicks of the wrist and remove foreign objects by pinching the A and B buttons much like you would pinch your forceps around whatever it is you’re picking up. The nunchuck’s purpose is to cycle through your tools. So instead of having to move your cursor over to the side of the screen every time you need to switch, you rotate the analog stick. This entire setup feels really good and is immediately natural, letting you focus on the operation and not on trying to get used to a new control scheme.

There is also a special “healing touch” move you use to temporarily slow down time and help you regain your bearings. In more difficult operations, using the healing touch is a necessity. To pull it off, you actually draw a star on the screen with the Wii remote. Unfortunately, what you draw has to be a very accurate representation of a star. The slightest discrepancy won’t register. It often takes me four or five tries before the healing touch kicks in, but by then, my patient’s vitals are too low to ever come back. The healing touch is designed as a last desperate effort to save your operation, but getting it to work usually wastes more time.

In that sense, Trauma Center can be a little frustrating. It can be very frustrating if you try to play on Hard. This is the operating table, after all, and there’s little room for error. You can surely expect to repeat some operations over and over before getting them right. A nice feature, however, is that you can switch between the three difficulties at any time. You don’t have to start the story on Normal and stick with Normal all the way through. If you reach an operation that is too demanding, you can fall back on Easy and still progress without any repercussions. It’s such a relief to have, and seeing it here will make you wish every game did this.

Being able to drop from Normal to Easy whenever you wish does make it tempting to breeze through the story. Still, you’ll likely have the desire to go back and retry operations on Hard just to see if you can do it. And some of the more realistic operations are pretty fun and worth visiting a second time once the game is complete. Getting to the end, though, only requires a good 10-12 hours of play. If you’re a completist/perfectionist, there’s plenty more for you to do, but it nevertheless feels like a short adventure. This is especially true if you just came from playing Twilight Princess for 40 hours.

Final Comments

Trauma Center: Second Opinion is definitely a unique and intriguing game. The Wii controller is successful in bringing the procedures of the operating room into your home, and the final product is both enjoyable and rewardingly nerve-racking. But, like many of Atlus’s games, though the concepts are great, the execution is sub par. I’m usually not a stickler for a high quality presentation, but Trauma Center needs it in order to create a better atmosphere. As is, the cut scenes are painfully boring, and operating feels empty without any meaningful spoken dialogue. Plus, the over-the-top science-fiction story turns the gameplay into something more akin to fighting space aliens than performing surgery, and it just doesn’t work well. If Atlus is so insistent on having such an outrageous basis, then maybe it should incorporate the surgery into an action/adventure game. Because the surgery is fun. It’s just out of place with everything else here.