Trauma Center (series)/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Why must you complete all operations with the time limit? For example, in Under The Knife 2, this troper's stuck on an episode (forget the number) in which there are three burn victims, treated with skin grafting. This troper always treats all but one of the many burns, then runs out of time. Angie insists that the victims must be hospitalised, although another thirty seconds would successfully complete the operation, when transport to hospital could worsen the injuries instead.
    • You're Derek Stiles; assuming you've played the other games before, you probably remember doing a bunch of feats that no regular doctor could do (if not, the game informs you). What doesn't make Angie think you can treat three burn victims (that are tough) within 5 minutes? But really, I got through that with about three seconds left (after several retries, probably), so I understand how you feel.
    • This type of situation would be incredibly humorous in real life. "Alright, that's 5 minutes, close him up." "But I'm performing open heart surgery!" "I don't think you heard me. It's been five minutes. Oh, and turn in your letter of resignation, too."
      • It's acceptable that Angie thinks you can operate with five minutes, but halting the operation and causing Derek to mysteriously quit surgery forever if you take five minutes, three seconds is kinda over-reacting...
    • When performing open surgery it makes sense that you have a set limit based on established medical rules for how long it's safe to keep a patient cut open without causing lasting harm. The burn victim thing still doesn't make a lick of sense, though.
      • Except that earlier operations give you ten minutes to perform open-surgery ops, and later ones give you basically the same operation, but only five minutes.
    • Easiest answer; it's Gameplay and Story Segregation, and let's face it, hardly the most absurd thing in the series.
    • Due to severity of the situation, aka not much time between dealing with the mother of dangers perhaps?
    • Apparently the devs read TVTropes: the only three timed missions in Trauma Team are justified by the FBI coming to arrest CR-S01, the patient suffering from hemorrhaging in the lungs (meaning he'll soon stop breathing), and a mall about to collapse.
  • Why does Derek stay on in TC:UTK 2, when Emilio dies, but when he fails extraction of crocodile teeth, he leaves forever?
  • "The Medical Board will be notified." Yes, notify the medical board of your failure to save a patient from flaming spider parasites and eyeballs growing on the heart! It's a fine game over message for the early missions, but when you're dealing with manufactured parasites that, until you came along, were considered a death sentence, (And do I need to mention the Eyeball on the heart again?) it just sounds silly.
  • During the first half of TC:UTK 2, Derek loses sight of his priorities and becomes a reckless fame-seeker - according to Angie. When exactly did that happen? Absolutely none of the publicity appearances were Derek's ideas, and all of them were justifiably in the interest of the organisation and the advancement of medicine. Even the terrible mistake that leads to Derek's Heroic Blue Screen of Death wasn't even a mistake - everyone, Angie included, agreed that he made the correct choice, and that they would've done the same, Healing Touch or no. What's even dumber is that after admitting that Derek made all the right choices, she still insists that it was his fault. Just...how!? If you're going to guilt-trip someone, do it before you specifically state that they've done no wrong. Gah! Fantastic game, but the third chapter's story is just doesn't flow.
  • I really just have to say, that the fact that Twisted Rosalia is never actively fought seriously bugs me. No pun intended :P. It's probably the coolest looking enemy in the series, something that would give Savato nightmares, and it just up and dies the moment it reveals itself.
    • Again, have you forgotten that in order to remove it, you have to inject Naomi with something that makes her heart stop beating, therefore causing her vitals plummet like a rock? You don't have time for a big fight!
    • If you think about it, it's kind of appropriate: Trauma Team is the only game in the series without a real Big Bad, so it only fits you don't fight the final form of the disease directly.
  • Why is CR-S01 still imprisoned after this is done? I mean there's confirmed evidence, obtained by his FBI handler, that says the guy responsible for the outbreak was Sartre. Even if he helped the man develop the Rosalia Virus then that's either negligence or 2nd Degree Manslaughter. Either way there's enough evidence to earn him a new trial. True there were those escape attempts, but still, that 250 years is bound to be reduced dramatically.
    • The ignoring the evidence part definitely bugs me. Though considering that he's an apparent full surgeon now, and he gets 5 years off per operation. That's only 50 operations, which with the game's timescale doesn't seem to be too long.
    • Before the shit really hits the fan during the last episode, Holden tells CR-S01 that he has "good news" for him. This combined with the fact CR-S01 is seen taking more operation requests in jail (and I think he's actually grinning a little if memory serves) makes it seem like his sentence was greatly reduced and he's willingly working off the rest to atone for his part in the research.
  • Do people talk at normal speed while Healing Touch is active?
    • Maybe. At least in Under the Knife 2, cutscenes like GUILT dying and shifting the camera also happen at half speed like the rest of gameplay, so any speech that isn't advanced manually also takes twice as long, Derek included.
  • How does CR-S01 survive in a room kept at zero degrees Celsius? Wouldn't he get hypothermia?
    • He wears an absurd robot helmet and a magic black cloak! But seriously it's just 32 degrees Fahrenheit and he could survive with protective clothing.
    • I was never entirely clear as to why he needed to be in a freezing room... He was fine at normal temp while operating and when caged in the hospital. He isn't contagious, indeed he isn't even sick.
    • To stop him from cultivating bacteria and using it to kill people. ...Yeah.
      • Gabriel even points out that it was possible to get bacteria and viruses to live in 0 degrees Celsius. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.
    • I'm not sure, but I also thought it was also supposed to be one of those cryogenic chambers that freezes your body in time.
  • The ending. Yes, they found and ways to cure the Rosalia Virus and they cured Naomi, but did they every explain how they are going to get rid of that huge mass of infected flowers and butterflies?
    • They have a way for people to effectively fight it now. That was the victory of the doctors. The government probably decided to take that on their own.
  • This has been puzzling me for a while. How did Veronica Cage and Sandra Lieberman know the name of the Rosalia virus?
    • I always just assumed Veronica Cage and Sandra Liebermann hallucinated/saw Rosalia during the course of their illness, like Maria did through the course of the game. Though I really wonder why that happened to her in the first place.
  • I still don't get how Albert Sartre ended up 3000 km away as a skeleton, if he died shortly after going insane in Mexico, and then Chloe ends up swallowing some of his skull.
    • You've got me on that last part, but concerning Sartre's location, I thought the game had implied that even as he was going insane, he still felt insanely guilty over how he left CR-S01 in that Cumberland College incident. If you buy that he was still sane enough to buy a plane ticket and get over there, he probably died looking for him. Even his last words showed that he was only thinking about his son.
    • As for Chloe eating the piece of skull, this troper assumes that a piece fell out of the case of bones that Gabe was carrying, as that thing could have been damaged by the fact he fell out of a helicopter with it, and Chloe ate it while wandering around the hospital.
  • So, in Trauma Team, a school bus runs through the wall of the mall where Tomoe, Maria, Hank and Gabe are walking around. Which is okay and completely freaking awesome, until you realize they're on the third floor. How the hell did a schoolbus get up to the third floor of a mall?
    • There are plenty of buildings that have multiple entrances built into multiple floors, it could have been built into a tall hill with roads on equal height with the third and first floors. Cities aren't completely flat areas, they rise and fall, and so do the roads.
  • Why can't they just extract the guilt/stigma or anything first? then fix up the patient once they are longer able to harm the patient?
    • You can extract/kill some of them right away. The ones that you have to do work to kill are generally too big to pull out. However, vitals drop so quickly that you have to keep patching them up as you go.
    • The real question is how can Guilt leave someone alive long enough to get to the hospital, but kill someone in minutes once the operation begins?
    • The stress caused by opening up the patient activates the Guilt or Stigma. Before the operation, it's mostly dormant.
  • In Trauma Team during the end of "Carpet of Blue Death," Maria sees Naomi bleeding from her mouth and appears to recognize it as a sign of the Rosalia Virus, but then after they return Maria never mentions this fact to anyone that I saw. That just confused me given how dangerous they all know that the virus is and Maria is apparently very concerned about Naomi while this is happening, even if it gets brushed away at the time. I understand why Maria might not have pressed the issue while they were away from the hospital. They couldn't have treated it at the time anyway and arguing would be a waste of precious time, but to then not mention it to anyone when they could have potentially treated it and to just join in on the celebrations for having defeated the virus seems really... odd. Made even harder for me to accept with the fact that everyone's apparently shocked by the fact that Naomi caught the virus, so it's not as though it can be excused as being discussed and dealt with (Presumably unsuccessfully, but that would be excusable because it ends up being a mutated form so the serum wouldn't work) off screen because it doesn't appear that anyone knew that Naomi ever contracted it. So, I guess Maria just forgot to mention it? I don't know. That's just a really unsatisfying answer for me. Even if Maria didn't realize what it meant and her shock was just shock at what she was seeing, blood coming from someone's mouth is never a good thing and she's supposedly an excellent doctor in her own right, so why wouldn't she have mentioned it to anyone, so that it could be investigated? Did I miss something?
  • This came up first on the WMG page, but this particular question seems to fit better here, rather then derailing the other topic more. So, just how flexible is the Healing Touch in how it functions? For example, Naomi uses Derek's during the Savato X mission in Second Opinion to finish it off, but we never really see her or any of the other Healing Touch surgeons use a gift other then their own again in canon. Which brings up the question, assuming we treat the X missions as canon, can she do it again or was it a one time thing? Can the other Healing Touch surgeons do the same with enough experience and/or training? Given most of the examples in canon, I'd say that it appears that the surgeons are locked to their own Healing Touch, but the thing with Naomi kind of brings that into question. Thoughts? Am I over-thinking this?
    • From what I can tell, the Healing touch powers can combine if two or more characters have stand-alone versions. It's a gameplay mechanic in New Blood, since you need to use both Healing touches to treat the patient. Naomi was only able to use Derek's Healing Touch because she was operating on him. If it was the other way round, Derek would possibly be using Naomi's Healing Touch, if it was possible.
  • How does the game's scoring system work & how it's calculated (the way it is).
  • New Blood's antagonists seem a bit strange. Character design aside, the names seem a bit ridiculous to be real. Surely they must be given aliases? I mean, "Leland Phoenix" doesn't seem to be a normal name to give to someone unironically.
  • "What" exactly are X-Missions? From a gameplay standpoint obviously they're a challenge, but in terms of plot, are non-canon? Or something else entirely?
  • Who created the "Antibiotic Gel", and at what timeframe? (Fulton in 1-1 states "...cure-all ointments were just gimmicks and scams... but someone finally created a real one."
  • Cases of a Stabilizer causing an overdose? What would be the requirements be/just how much of the liquid is lethal at certain doses? (Stabilizer Poisoning?)
  • How long were the Caduceus Directors in position of power for? Is it just unexplained?
  • Missing Caduceus Branch? Is it ever given? Localization skews with things a bit. In the original JP, branches and their assigned directors are: [Japan] Robert Hoffman, [USA] Langston Miller, [Europe] ??? . English localization however... [Japan] ???, [USA] Robert Hoffman, [Europe] Langston Miller.
  • Under the Knife states that from the Gods of Medicine(?)/potential linage? Or whatever can bless a user to have the potential to use the ability, but how on earth does that make sense? Wouldn't it make more sense if everyone has the potential to use it, but are locked inside the deepest part of the unconscious mind? New Blood mentions that it can be learned via some occult manual black magic, but doesn't give any further details. So if anyone has access to the guide then they could potentially "learn" it? How does that make sense when the most common way of discovering the ability is either times of desperation, peril or stress? If we are going by the "hidden potential" part of the ability, then which personnel can potentially use it? Surgeons? Former medical personnel assuming they still are aware of its existence? Ordinary people (if they could manage to get their hands on the info?) Can nurses have the potential to awaken or use Healing Touch as well? I don't think there's an explanation on its variants on how or why they exist (Bello's "distraction block", Blaylock's variant where the patient's vitals are "locked" in place), how would it be learned, its user's personality, etc?? But what dictates its "variant" in the first place?
  • In utk, the MC discovers his ability and it "activates" during a time of desperation, the duration lasting however long it needed to be in that current situation of peril. MC's speed is (I think??) self-afflicted and after the ability's usage its draining on the user so fainting isn't uncommon. I'm not sure about exact details but (what I think happens, anyway) I assume with that HT state essentially the user's body speeds up in accordance to the ability? ...But how far can you take it? How long can an instinctual Healing Touch (done out of desperation) be drawn out for until, essentially, the user('s bodily state) is significantly impacted, or the user straight up dying from exhaustion? Can the HT be forcefully extracted? Be used at inappropriate times? (Ex. Paranoia or anxiety causes the user to "activate" it as a result of fight or flight, etc) Against the user's will? Overuse or misuse of HT significantly affects the user's perception of time? Since the Touch draws its power at the user's bodily expense, wouldn't users that invoke it often have a shorter lifespan due to the constant compounding stress on themselves? Hell, since invoking the Touch requires some sort of focus or state of flow, could using stimulants/(hard)drugs also work as well (artificial focus?)?
  • What does the Healing Touch & its variants do without a "target" of focus? Example: One variant that 'locks' a patient's vitals (without them lowering or raised), another that raises vitals with successful actions (ingame). All these are directed at a target (patient, or self (the way Adel sped himself up to attack Stiles)). If the user summons the Touch by itself with no object of focus, where do the effects (if applicable) go? Does it redirect to the user themselves? Or elsewhere, maybe not at all?
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