Review by: Andrew Groen

Despite flying casually under-the-radar these past few years, the Trauma Center series has slowly developed a niche fan base since its introduction to the Nintendo DS just five years ago. Prior to Trauma Team, the series had reached what many believed to be a high-water mark. The previous Wii entry, Trauma Center: New Blood, was a solid game with only minor problems. Now, with Trauma Team, Atlus has crafted an experience that corrects even the minor failings of New Blood, and pumps a startling amount of new gameplay into a series that most critics assumed had shown all its cards long ago.

The big change for this installment is the titular Trauma "Team" which refers to a set of six doctors whose particular medical specialties have a knack for complementing each other. Apart from facilitating several different types of gameplay, this theme runs throughout the entire game.

The ability to switch between doctors gives you a larger degree of control over how you want to play. If you really like fast-paced live-or-die types of surgeries then it's within your control to play all of those first, while getting to the other doctors eventually (if you want to.) The multi-doctor approach also helps in controlling the difficulty—which is considerable on some of the high-stress, multi-patient operations.

Finally, the division of the story into six somewhat interrelated story arcs has drastically improved the quality of the narrative. Far from the extreme oddities and hocus-pocus of New Blood's storyline, Trauma Team is a low-key yet often heartfelt story about six people dealing with the role of their career in their lives.

It was a brave design decision to make a story about personal development rather than attempting a sweeping, grandiose narrative. But in doing so they created a staff that we really care about, which is a first for this series. For a series known for its bizarre anime-esque tendencies, it says a lot that its most memorable moment was when one doctor agreed to put his obsessive compulsive need to save lives aside, and go have a beer with his colleague after work.

Old habits die hard, though. Despite having three strong female lead characters, the game does them all a disservice. Two of the three are introduced nude, bathing, naughty-bits barely covered. The other wears a V-neck shirt cut down to her belly button. I can appreciate the differences in style between western and eastern animation, but in the West it is very difficult the craft strong characters when the authors so candidly reveal that they feel the only way to get the player interested in a character is to show them naked first.