Headscratchers / Trauma Center (Atlus)

• 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.
    • In one of the earliest missions in Trauma Center, you have the usual 5 minutes to perform the operation but at the end Angie tells you 'It's been a long surgery. Why don't you go rest?' So unless 5 minutes a really long time in the game's world, it's definitely classic story/gameplay segregation.
    • In episode Z-4 of Second Opinion Naomi and Little Guy state multiple times that the kidney you're transplanting is an hour away. The first part of the surgery before the kidney shows up can be done in easily under a minute, I think that's the most definitive proof that the gameplay timer is NOT the same as the amount of time passing in-universe. Failing to treat three burn victims in five hours might make the people around you think you've just lost all competency as a doctor and gives complications a plenty of time to arise.
  • 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.

• I wonder how the game's scoring system works & how it's calculated (the way it is)

• Why does Derek stay on in TC:UTK2, 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.
  • Caduceus hired Derek specifically for his proven ability to. I'd be disappointed too if I hired a guy with time-warping powers and they weren't enough.
    • No you wouldn't, not really if you had any level of sense. Because when you start encountering flaming spider parasites you've gone past the line of "I expect you can do this". At that point many of the successes could be considered miracles and half of the point of a miracle is that they're extremely unlikely to happen. To say "This doctor is so good I expect a miracle every time a new ungodly disease comes out" is insane. Being the best man for the job and being perfect are two different things.
  • Even more ridiculous when you're given this message if you fail to pick the lock to the room your kidnappers have put you in.
  • Did you know that one out of every three patients that goes to a hospital will die?
  • Who said the board is angry? It only say that they'll be notified, which i sure do hope they're being updated of the current status of these flaming spider parasites. I always thought that it's **Derek** who resigned himself out of (shattered) ego, rather than the Board firing him.

• During the first half of TC:UTK2, 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 AND were approved by the director. 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.
  • Not only that but the explicit reason she gives is that she thinks Derek was negligent because he thought he could just rely on the healing touch. At the time Derek was surrounded with GUILT patients and even Angie was starting to panic while Derek frantically tried to keep cool and treat everyone. Not only that but they were dealing with a new mutation of Kyriaki meaning they had to do the same think on your feet routine as any other serious operation. Angie seems to seriously be under the impression that Derek was looking at parasites that try to cut organs to ribbons, finding new kinds that spawn more parasites, and said "Eh, it'll be fine. No rush." Extra points if you actually used the Healing Touch on one of them meaning that Derek would not even have it available anymore, you can't say he was overconfident in something he already exhausted.
    • No, that isn't the issue that Angie had with Derek. Derek was becoming so reliant on the idea of using the Healing Touch in operations, that he was beginning to feel like there was nothing to worry about so long as he activated it during tricky operations. Angie's problem was that Derek was becoming far too infatuated with the idea that he'd be able to always save everyone, because he became big-headed with the idea that he was an unstoppable medical wizard with magical powers. If you look at how Derek's attitude changes throughout the game, he becomes blase about dealing with difficult situations, seeing himself as more then just a fallible doctor. The reason everyone had an issue with how Derek handled the situation, was because of his blase attitude towards the entire thing which essentially amounted to "it'll be fine, I'm a doctor-wizard" , until it wasn't fine, and who'd have thought it, patients can die. Even removing the Healing Touch from the entire thing, he had gotten big-headed with how much everyone relied on him and saw him as a miracle worker, to the point where he expect a miracle to just naturally happen in every surgery he performed. Then at that point he didn't get that miracle, which was a blunt lesson to him that no matter who he is, at the end of the day, he's just a human doctor who can't always rely on miracles, his reputation, nor his gift, to make sure the day is saved.
• 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.
  • Also, Twisted Rosalia is a superinfection that only Naomi had. It is said that Rosalia absorbed Naomis genetic disease and mutates into twisted Rosalia. Removing Twisted Rosalia eradicated both diseases.
• 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.
  • It should be noted that the Healing Touch doesn't literally slow down time, it simply gives the illusion that time has slowed down to the person using it, as their actions are performed so ridiculously quickly and with extreme accuracy. It would be more accurate to consider it to be superhuman speed, rather then the ability to slow down/freeze time. The camera shifting is explainable as to the fact that that's Derek shifting his perspective which he's doing in a snap, but stuff like GUILT dying in slo-mo is either for dramatic effect, or because the Healing Touch is programmed to literally slow the on-screen action down which includes when the GUILT dies. So people probably do talk in normal speed around Derek when he's using it.
• 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.
    • No. The reason is literally stated to be so he can't cultivate bacteria to kill people (as incorrect as that turns out to be). The chamber isn't made to have an effect on his body. Just to prevent him from potentially causing another bioattack. Not to mention, freezing the body to halt the effects of aging would require a MUCH lower temperature than zero degrees Celsius and could potentially kill the subject upon defreezing.
• 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.
  • Furthermore, as far as I have understood it, only the discolored flowers around Rosalia's body carried the virus.
• 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.
    • Both Rosalia and the Rosalia virus are heavily implied to be supernatural to some extent. In fact, there's some implication that the virus was taking revenge for the murder of its original host with the epidemic in a way that almost makes it seem sentient. There's no confirmation of this but considering that you see Rosalia's ghost often and this series has always dabbled a little in the supernatural, it's not too hard to imagine the virus implanting Rosalia's name in its victims' heads. As for why Maria keeps seeing Rosalia's ghost, I always assumed it was because that was someone they knew very well and trusted, and who they hoped would be able to help the situation. The only other person they knew well, CR-S01, wasn't in a position to help from what they could remember.
• 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.
    • Except that Chloe eating the piece of skull happened before Gabe arrived. Naomi had assisted Tomoe in removing the bones before Gabe arrived that is why she had them on hand when she needed them.
    • Naomi would latter estimate at when Chloe eating the piece of skull to be one week before it was removed.
• 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.
  • It's pretty easy to miss, but in Tomoe's part of the operation, it's stated that Maria is on the first floor to help the people there. The mall is an underground one, with the first floor also being the top floor.
• 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?
  • Well, they did just find the cure for Rosalia. It doesn't sound unlikely that Maria just had Naomi injected with the cure and assumed that it finished the disease off. Nobody but Naomi knew it was something else.
  • There is no reason to think that she would not have been vaccinated, after all she just spent time in the Carpet of Blue Death and so would have been infected first hand. The twist of coures was that it was not just the Rosalia Virus so the vaccine would not have worked.
  • Naomi's got a vague intractable disease that I've always assumed was common knowledge among her coworkers, or if it's not she could definitely use as an excuse if asked about it. If you're already used to coughing up blood on occasion it wouldn't warrant suspicion until other Rosalia symptoms develop.
• 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.
• In Trauma team, how did Sartre cause the Cumberland College Incident if the virus was not transmitted by air?
  • The virus itself is not transmitted by air. However, if infected material touches a mucous membrane, then the virus is transmitted. The researcher in the final diagnostics mission was infected by breathing in contaminated bone dust. Maybe Albert Sartre spread infected blood throughout the building with the ventilation system?
  • I always had this idea that he was going around shanking people with a syringe.
    • That wouldn't be fast enough to kill everybody, and if that did happen there would certainly be witnesses who got away, meaning that CR-S01 wouldn't be framed. Based on the fact that the virus has a dormancy phase, something had to have happened over time, and Sartre hadn't contracted and gone crazy due to the Rosalia virus yet, so whatever happened was certainly unintentional. My guess would be similar to the above, in that since he was becoming increasingly frustrated with his research not working out, he became careless in how he handled the virus and accidentally allowed infected particles to enter the ventilation system, infecting everyone outside his research lab (this is important because neither he nor CR-S01 were infected despite being at the college, so they had to be in a safe place).
• Originally I was going to ask how CR-S01 knows how to combat Rosalia considering how little time he would have had with it before he was put on ice. But a better question is how CR-S01 became such a great surgeon anyway? Going by the Caduceus Database info CR-S01 was born in 1996. In 2010 Rosalia Rossellini would become his sister. And in 2012 (at the ripe age of 16) he was locked away for just 250 years. Latter in 2020 he was offered to operate on patients in exchange for years' sentence reduction per procedure. With me so far? So when did he learn how to be a surgeon?
  • Well, for that, you just have to look at a few cutscenes. Specifically, the part where he gets his memories back. So, first off, we have him sitting in a room, reading a book that we can't really see. Still, it looks pretty heavy. He could have been studying medicine on his own. And then, after he is adopted by Sartre, at some point he is told by Sartre that he was accepted, and that they are now student and teacher. It's entirely possible that this means he was a genius prodigy from a young age. We don't know how old he was when he got accepted into Cumberland College but it's entirely possible that this would explain how he's such a great surgeon by the time we first meet him.
    • CR may have been a genius, but medical knowledge does not equal surgical knowledge. They never say when he entered college, but it could not have been more then 2 years (age 14). And even if he was taught by Sartre (who would be busy with his own research) that would not make up for the years that one needs to become a great doctor. Consider this, to become a normal doctor one must: go through 4 years at college, 4 years medical school, 5 years general surgery residency, including internship. Even if he was an intern at 16 that still would not have giving him much or even any surgical experience, AND this is before he spends 8 years as Mr.Freeze's understudy.
    • It's entirely possible that Sartre was allowing him to practice surgery at such a young age. He wouldn't be wrapped up in his research all the time and CR-S01 even stated that it was due to him that he gained his skills. Now, is it less than legal to allow someone as young as 14 operate on people? Definitely, but Trauma Center is full of prodigies who became doctors really young, so I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility.
• Naomi's missions in Trauma Team are pretty weird. Despite her working for Forensics in that game, she doesn't do a single autopsy. True, some of the victims were reduced to skeletons, but others were in condition to do an autopsy. It would have helped to determine the cause of death in the first of Naomi's missions, for example.
  • This is probably a game mechanics issue - imagine how much modeling they'd have to do for every patients's organs.
• Why does the game lay all the blame on Veronica's death on her parents? By the time they locked her in her room, she'd already beaten them so badly that she left her mother with permanently damaged eyesight. We have no idea if they could afford to have her hospitalized instead, and given how many trips they had to make, it's a good bet they were almost broke. Kimishima really seems like a total bitch for guilt-tripping them over locking her away. This should be a tragedy in all directions, not just for Veronica.
  • The death of a patient is every doctors lament. No mater what circumstances the parents faced, they still have options; where as Veronica has none.
    • The major problem here is that we're never shown any other choices the parents had. The only one that seems sensible under the given conditions is the one the game lambasts them for taking.
    • The problem is not what the parents could have done, but what they did. They ignored their daughter's worsening condition in the vain attempt that it would go away on its own. Even if nothing could have been done for Veronica, that does not mean that they should have dumped her body in the middle of the road. Besides, Naomi has her own reasons for feeling upset about the turn of events in the story and does not deserve to be turned into a strawman.
    • How am I strawmanning her? And you didn't actually answer any of the issues.
    • You don't seem to understand that increased aggression and hallucinations (among others) were symptom of the disease that was killing Veronica. Veronica probably never hurt them before becoming infected with Rosalia. You want to know what they should have done? The should have called for an 911 and rushed Veronica to an emergency room. Failing that, they should have laid her to rest in a respectful and legal manner. As for strawmanning; You are painting Naomi Kimishima as an Unintentionally Unsympathetic character despite that fact that Naomi herself is dying of an unknown terminal genetic disease. Veronica's story would have cut close to home for her.
• Why is Derek the only one wearing a mask in his operations? That's like rule #1 when working in the OR. What if Angie sneezed during an operation? At least in New Blood everyone in the OR was wearing proper attire.
  • The likely answer is that they didn't want to draw new portraits for the characters. We can safely assume that the doctors in the game are taking standard precautions, since we're never explicitly told or shown that they aren't.
    • If you pay attention to in-game dialog, they're probably wearing more than standard safety gear, at least when working with GUILT. I recall something along the lines of hazmat suits being mentioned.
• The series is set 20 Minutes into the Future. Fine. But why does it seem like certain inventions don't exist? For example, it seems no one has ever heard of a heart-lung machine (at least Naomi is mentioned as being too weak to use one in Trauma Team's final surgery) or glass that does not break with sharp edges (which is normally used in automobiles).
  • Unless this troper is mistaken, the number of patients you operate on which would have benefitted from technology such as a heart-lung machine can be counted on one hand. The way the surgeries work in the game is so fast-paced that there just isn't enough time to get patients the "standard" care they would receive in real life.
• Something that's been bothering me in every single entry in the series... When you're pulling out a foreign object and accidently drop it while bringing it over to the tray, why doesn't said object just fall on top of the operation field? Instead, the object magically flies back to the wound and re-inserts itself there. It's bad enough that glass shards and bone fragments do this, but in Trauma Team, even a massive steel beam will do this. In short, there's no logical answer why this happens.
  • gameplay mostly, and the devs probably not taking the extra time to program in "physics" for the game.
• 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.