Trauma Center (series)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternative Character Interpretation: As per Five-Man Band in the Main tab, nobody can decide on who The Hero of Trauma Team is. The most likely candidates are Gabe and CR-S01, the former since he keeps showing up in everyone's stories and the epilogue ends with him.
  • Anvilicious: Dying is bad, and wanting to die or other people to die is even worse. Also, modern medicine is awesome, and anything that interferes with it is bad for society at large.
  • Awesome Music: Surprisingly epic music for what's basically a series about surgery. Complete with Ominous Latin Chanting!
    • The ending theme of Trauma Team, Gonna Be Here (the series' only vocal track), brought its composer to tears when he heard it play over the ending.
    • The Bloody Rose stays true to the series' trend of epic final battle themes. However, this one succeeds over the other three such themes in terms of epicness in spades, even if the battle itself isn't quite as frantic as its predecessors. Your Mileage May Vary.
      • Rosalia's GUILT. It's an emotional, sad remix of "Vulnerability" from Second Opinion that plays during the final operation of Trauma Team, when CR-S01 injects the cardioplegic solution into Naomi Kimishima's heart, causing it to stop beating and her maximum vitals to start plummeting. You have literally seconds to excise the Twisted Rosalia virus that has taken over her heart before her vitals peg at zero, and no Healing Touch to see you across the finish line. You screw up, and that's it: Naomi fucking dies.
  • Base Breaking Character:
    • For every fan who hates Angie and wants her to Die for Our Ship, there is one who loves her.
    • In Trauma Team, both Tomoe herself and her gameplay mode are this to a great degree.
  • Breather Boss: Of all the original GUILT strains, Tetarti is often seen as the easiest to treat, due to it not being able to do a lot of damage unless the player screws up the injection. The variation introduced in Second Opinion also lacks the No Miss special bonus to give the player more leeway with it. When it gets re-hashed in Under the Knife 2, its method of being more difficult is... 2 more colours to spot and memorize, which is far easier than the increased tedium and aggression of Kyriaki and Pempti respectively.
  • Broken Base: Trauma Team's noticeably lower difficulty. Trauma Center, like many Atlus games/series, is renown for being Nintendo Hard, so it falls into It's Easy, So It Sucks! for many players. Others, however, hated getting stonewalled by sudden difficulty spikes in the other games (most especially in New Blood) when they just want to see the rest of the games' content, and appreciated that Trauma Team allowed players to move through it at a steady pace.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Adam von Raitenau in Under the Knife. It takes a special kind of bastard to come up with something as horrible as GUILT. Or to put a group of children into an And I Must Scream situation in order to create the GUILT archetypes, for that matter.
    • His grandson Heinrich in Under the Knife 2. This piece of scum actually managed to out-monster Adam! It's one thing to use innocent children in an And I Must Scream state of near-death to cultivate GUILT. But it takes a whole other level of evil to do it to your own children!
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Victor Niguel and "Little Guy". The latter becomes surprisingly popular within the fandom despite his very minor role.
    • Linda Reid (a patient) in Under the Knife. The major reasons are that she's at the center of Derek's character development, and she's the first GUILT patient.
  • Fan-Disliked Explanation: Remember how Derek Stiles got infected with GUILT in Second Opinion? Under the Knife 2 introduces post-GUILT syndrome. If it affects him at all or if he takes a medication mentioned later in the game to cure it is never mentioned, and it is unlikely they will ever revisit Derek given the direction they've been taking the series since Trauma Team.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This game series is far more popular in America than Japan, to the degree that from Second Opinion onwards, the games are released in North America before Japan. New Blood and Trauma Team even take place in the United States.
  • Hell Is That Noise: If you screw up dissecting Triti, it lets out a horrible scream- rather disturbing, seeing as it is a mass of triangles. This is the sound of the patent's organs slowly petrifying from the outside in.
    • The song that kicks in for the REALLY desperate First Response missions, known as Pandemic, not the entire song itself (thought it is tense), but the (synth?) guitar riff that starts at the 1:20 mark. It really complements the fact that you're dealing with countless people on the brink of death from a disease ripped straight out of Hell itself.
  • Ho Yay: Adel and Derek in Under the Knife 2. Especially evident in one scene about halfway through.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Trauma Team is notably less difficult than other games; in particular, the final operation is much easier than in past games, much to the chagrin of the fanbase.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
    • Derek is paired with any remotely attractive male character (this is Atlus after all). Tyler and Victor come to mind.
    • CR-S01 has been paired with all of main characters of Trauma Team, characters not even in the game, and his sister and adoptive father.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • The Medical Board will be notified.
    • I DISAGREE!
    • It's good for... KILLING
    • In the Japanese version, we have Adel calling Tsukimori (Japanese version of Derek's surname) with the tone sounds as foreign as possible. Sadly, it becomes "Daktar Tsukimori" instead.
    • The song "Gentle Breeze" from Under the Knife 2 is now frequently used alongside pictures of deformed or odd-looking shots of SpongeBob SquarePants characters, beginning with Squidward, and going downhill from there.
  • Moe: Joshua Cunningham in Trauma Team.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Adam is a deranged lunatic who wishes for humanity to be wiped out via horrible parasites, and he crossed it by taking seven innocent children and using them as incubators for GUILT.
  • Most Annoying Sound: Guy Davidson in New Blood.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The "Cool" SFX, as well as the sound that plays when you get an XS rank.
    • The sound effect in Naomi's story in Trauma Team when a clue becomes "Solid Evidence".
  • Narm: As expected of a series like this, the games are rife with examples. New Blood, not so much.
    • Elena Salazar: I believe in your suturing skills!
    • Derek Stiles: I WILL SAVE THIS PATIENT!
  • Narm Charm: Hank Freebird in Trauma Team.
  • Older Than They Think: This wasn't the first major surgery-based game (that would be Life and Death), but since it's been fifteen years since that game was made, it is often credited as the first surgical game. It might as well be, considering the rarity of Life and Death these days.
    • In fact, it isn't even the first DS surgery game! That belongs to the first Kenshūi Tendō Dokuta game, which was only released in Japan. It notably focuses on realism, however, and places much more emphasis on the characters than the surgery.
  • Player Punch:
    • In Under the Knife, you can't help but hate Adam for what he did to Amy Chase.
    • After operating on him so many times, and succesfully eradicating his Pempti, Richard Anderson's body gives out, and he dies.
    • The discovery of the Sinners is what really drives home the point that Adam is pure, undiluted, irredeemable evil.
    • Under the Knife 2 punches you again with Emilio's death. He was a sinner, he survived a new form of GUILT that was dormant in a transplanted liver for him, and then he gets infected with GUILT again. Derek plans to operate on him after taking care of several other patients, but when he's ready to operate on Emilio, he dies.
  • Signature Scene: The mission where you defuse a bomb with surgery tools in the original game. It's not widely remembered because it's fun or challenging or anything, but because it was a ridiculously big Unexpected Gameplay Change.
  • Stoic Woobie: CR-S01/Erhardt Muller in Trauma Team. He was hated by his parents, his adoptive father went insane and killed his sister and thousands of other people. He was then convicted of killing those people and sentenced to 250 years in jail. Even when he can reduce his sentence by performing surgeries, he has to go back to his cell shortly after the operations, and thus can't hang out with the rest of the cast. Despite all of this, he doesn't seem that affected on the outside.
  • That One Achievement: One of the achievements in Trauma Team require you to get a Cool rating while shaving a bone in less than one second. That's incredibly fast, and you need to be accurate in a step where you can easily over or undershoot, and runs contrary to the more relaxed atmosphere of Orthopedics. You only need to do this once, but it will take plenty of practice to get the timing right.
  • That One Boss:
    • Aletheia in Under the Knife 2 despite being a Final Boss. It's a Final-Exam Boss due to how it summons waves of previous GUILT strains, but due to restrictions of the surgery environment, the GUILT summoned by it can behave much differently from when they were encountered in the main story. It becomes temporarily vulnerable when defeating individual GUILT bodies during a wave, but good luck getting to inject the main body while managing what's going on around it.
    • Triti is infamous due to being a rather mean type of Puzzle Boss. The game gives you hints on how to do it, but they are incredibly vague. While it can be trivialized with the Healing Touch, this is guaranteed to destroy your rank, so those seeking to get a good rank will be forced to look up a guide to extract it efficiently. It's so bad that there's a tutorial video on it on YouTube.
    • Pempti is less well-known than Triti, but arguably worse. You start by injecting nanomachines into its core, which causes it to withdraw its tissue and then expose itself in self-defense. Now you just blast it with the laser. Simple, right? Of course not, this is an Atlus game. While you're attacking it, Pempti generates mini-cores that can cause lacerations, send up a wave of fluid that creates small tumors, or just drain the vitals directly. It's relatively simple to fight them off, but once you start taking hits, it's easy to get caught in a downward spiral, especially since taking any time to restore vitals means taking the laser off of Pempti and its mini-cores, which causes you to lose more ground. Is it any surprise an entire chapter was devoted to finding a way to kill this thing?
    • The Pempti mutation in Under the Knife 2 makes this much harder as you have to juggle your focus between 2 slightly weaker cores. But when one core goes down, the other literally Turns Red as it attacks much more aggressively until it is destroyed. Hope you weren't just focusing all your firepower into a singe core... The X mission then complicates this slightly by making one core take a little more punishment than the other before it goes down, just to trip up the players who figured out to spread the damage evenly.
    • Paraskevi is a straightforward, if potentially tedious, Asteroids Monster of a GUILT. But the pain comes when trying to S-rank its first mission in Under the Knife. The conditions include not letting any Paraskevi fragments escape to other organs, along with a completion time of under 1 minute and 30 seconds. Considering how fast the Paraskevi move and begin to escape, the fact that they are temporarily invincible after cutting (so you can't stun them immediately), and with the vital damage from the lacerations forcing you to waste time to raise vitals, achieving the S-rank here is notoriously difficult. The other Paraskevi missions at least are more lenient on your time.
    • Second Opinion makes Paraskevi more easy to deal with by shortening its invincibility frames, slowing the rate at which it burrows away, and giving the player a visual warning when one of the Paraskevi threatens to burrow. But come the X-mission featuring Paraskevi, and suddenly, your patient's vitals are capped at half the usual max for an unexplained reason.
  • That One Level: Various levels can classify as this for two different reasons. One reason is that the difficulty of the level itself is rather high and can prove a source of frustration to those merely trying to clear the main plot. The other reason is that the level is straightforward when playing through the plot, but has incredibly tight conditions for an XS rank, turning into a major hurdle for those trying to XS every level. The former type of That One Level tends to be observed more often in New Blood as several operations, especially on Hard, are balanced towards two players simultaneously operating on the patient. New Blood has a couple missions that would certainly qualify for this trope (these don't count as That One Boss because there are multiple operations in these missions).
    • "Awakening", the ninth operation of the original, should be mentioned, especially since it's non-GUILT related. The patient's large intestine is suffering from aneurysms. To complete one, first, you have to magnify it. Then, shrink it with a needle until you can scalpel it. Then, forceps it to a tray. Drain the excess blood. Forceps the vessels together. Stitch. It's not the hard the first time, but once multiple ones start appearing, even the Healing Touch won't help. This extends to any aneurysm mission. The danger from them bursting is so great that after the first game, this operation almost always takes place within the brain just so you can start and stop immediately, and so the impact of multiple aneurysms bursting at once is more realistic. Hell, this mission was made easier for Second Opinion: one fewer aneurysm develops during the last push.
    • There are four challenge missions New Blood that involve treating a series of patients in a simulation. The final one involves one patient with that is infected with Kyriaki, Cheir and infant Savato, and the one before that involves a simultaneous Deftera and Soma infection.
    • In the main storyline of New Blood, there is an arguably even harder mission that involves three patients. The first one is a Brachion infection, which is the Puzzle Boss of New Blood. It's not particularly hard, but it eats up a large amount of time and can get nasty if the heads regenerate. The second operation is a simultaneous Cheir and Soma infection, which is nasty combination, but can be overcome with the right strategy and a little luck. The final operation is the worst thing ever. This patient is infected with both Soma and Onyx. This is downright criminal as treating Onyx invariably means taking your eye of Soma to find the hidden Onyx and you are almost guaranteed that a red tumor will harden while doing so. The kicker for these multiple patient operations is that when you lose, you have to start from the beginning, making it all the more annoying considering the Onyx/Soma combination is intricate enough to be its own mission.

Kyriaki: WHAT? THAT FIRST SLICE IS ALREADY SUTURED? FUCK THIS, I'M GOING HOME!

    • "Lost in Flames". Just... "Lost in Flames".
    • Every Triti mission is an example of this.
    • While Trauma Team is notably easier than the past games, getting an XS rank is now much more difficult. Nowhere does this become more apparent than "Blade of Resolve" and "Love in the Ground", which require the player to get all COOL miniranks and to finish absurdly fast.
      • If you're handling Tomoe's missions and the level involves multiple branching paths, on the first go, you're nearly guaranteed to get lost and waste precious time. The one where you have to search for Dr. Cunningham in a huge pile of rubble is the prime example.
      • Naomi's missions may not be ranked, but they are hard. This troper took over an hour each playing her missions.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Trauma Team has caused a Broken Base in this respect.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: Adel Tulba in Under the Knife 2. He's a black guy who can perfectly pass as a woman to new players.
  • The Woobie:
    • All of the Sinners, but Emilio takes the cake. Poor Emilio...
    • In Trauma Team, Rosalia Rosselini. An innocent girl that only wants to help people ended up killed by her own stepfather because she is the carrier of a doomsday virus.
    • Amy Chase in Under the Knife.
    • Cynthia Kazakov in New Blood. Sure, she was The Mole, but when she turns up again so broken by her failure, she speaks in a dead monotone and doesn't seem to care if she lives or not, it's hard not to feel sorry for her.
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