Trauma Center: Second Opinion is a direct port of 2005’s Trauma Center: Under the Knife on the DS. It follows Derek Stiles, a new surgeon who just recently started work at Hope Hospital. He’s never on time, and it’s hard for his coworkers to take him seriously, but he’s dedicated when it comes to his patients. He works with his assistant, Angie Thompson, who tries to keep him in line.
While working on a patient who was in a car crash, Derek is in a panic. Just as the patient is about to die due to multiple lacerations in the heart, he suddenly seals them up at lightning speed. What? Turns out Derek has the “Healing Touch,” and he’s a direct descendant of the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius. He’s able to slow down time and move super-fast to save patients from death. So, Derek must learn to control this power. Everything’s going fine, until a patient he previously worked on is wheeled into the emergency room, complaining of chest pain. It turns out this patient has a disease called GUILT (Gangliated Utrophin Immuno Latency Toxin). It’s essentially a man-made virus. It comes in different strains, and is recognized as a bio-terrorism threat. Soon after, he joins a cutting-edge medical hospital named Caduceus. They recognize his talent, and maximize his potential as a doctor. The story of Second Opinion revolves around Derek trying to conquer this horrible infection. At the end of every chapter, however, the game will throw you into another character’s shoes. Exclusive to Second Opinion, Dr. Weaver is a renowned surgeon with the healing touch. She is working for a shady organization, and the rest is spoiler-city.
This is a medical simulator. You’ll use tools like scalpels, forceps, and defibrillators to save the patients you work on. Pointing and moving is obviously handled by the Wii remote, while the task of switching tools is given to the nunchuck’s analog stick. This makes it easy to switch tools on the fly, which becomes essential later on in the game. Throughout the operation you’ll have to keep an eye on the patient’s “vitals,” which is basically their health bar. It will drain if they’re hurt by their disease or if you make a mistake. You can pump the vitals up by injecting them with a green solution in a syringe.
You suture wounds by moving the remote in a zigzag motion, revive patients by thrusting both the remote and nunchuck at the screen, and grab tumors and the like with the forceps by “pinching” the A and B buttons. And those are just the basics. After an operation, you get ranked based on how well you did. The ranks go from C (Amateur Surgeon) to XS (Medical Prodigy). The variety of patients and diseases you’ll treat seems vast, and it is, but by the end I found myself dreading certain strains of GUILT (Read: Triti) which you “fight” over and over.
That’s the thing about Trauma Center - this game is HARD. Even on easy, this game kicks the everloving crap out of me on certain operations. I’ve retried some operations at least 20 times, thrown controllers and tried to change the difficulty only to realize that it was already on easy.
For a Wii launch title, Second Opinion doesn’t look half bad. It definitely benefits by using the visual novel style. The 2D characters that show up on the screen look great, and the dialogue is pretty well-written. The patients and their, er, insides, look fine - it’s nothing too graphic. It’s not supposed to be, though. The organs have bright colors. It would be boring and strange if they didn’t. Not much to say about the graphics, though. They suffice. The music, though, is a different story. Atlus’ favorite composer, Shoji Meguro, created the soundtrack for Trauma Center. Yeah! Remember him from the Persona games’ music? The soundtrack fits - dare I say it - like a pair of latex gloves. The title music is awesome, the operating music is intense, and the story pans out even better when backed by great tunes.
I had fun playing Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Even though it was hard in spots, I appreciated the way the game played with the medical sim idea. Dude - you disarm a bomb with your surgical tools. It’s just an overall likable experience.