Being a medical drama, it certainly has its moments. These examples put the "Trauma" in Trauma Center.
Under the Knife and Second Opinion
- The death of Richard Anderson, who falls victim to Pempti. It hits particularly hard because this comes at the end of three attempts at ridding him of Pempti. While the GUILT is eliminated, the toll of three operations back-to-back is too much for Anderson's body to handle, so despite the best efforts of you and the rest of the staff, the operation ultimately ends in Anderson's death. Victor, who had been assisting you with these operations, is so distraught that he locks himself in the lab to refine his treatments so that such a situation never happens again.
- Though it's on the Narm page as well, the Game Over screen for Trauma Center: Second Opinion.
- Angie cries Tears of Joy when Naomi saves Derek. In the Japanese version, the crying nurse's voice is barely above a soft whisper when she thanks her. Conversely, there's the fallout in failing this operation; instead of calling for backup, Miller solemnly tells Naomi to contact Caduceus USA. It's a stinging loss for everyone, not just Caduceus for losing their best surgeon.
- The Game Over screen for Under the Knife can be much more effective than the other Game Over sequences. No melodramatic narration or resignation, just Derek walking the streets contemplating his failure.
Under the Knife 2
- When they are not Nightmare Fuel implying the death of Derek, the Game Over screen for can be quite the tearjerker:Chapter 1: A few days later, Derek Stiles left Camp Zakara... alone. Not even the gifted surgeon of Caduceus could bear the harsh realities of this foreign land...Chapters 2, 3, 4-1, 4-2: A few days after the surgery, Derek Stiles disappeared from Caduceus USA. His resignation letter, left of the Director's desk, said he would never hold a scalpel in his hand again... He was unable to withstand the pressure and burden of wielding the Healing Touch. Derek's whereabouts are unknown to this day....Chapter 4-4, 4-5, 4-7, 4-9: Derek Stiles left Hope Hospital without saying a word. After losing the Healing Touch and even the ability to perform a standard surgery, Derek couldn't go on as a doctor. No one knows what happened to him after that...Chapters 5, 6-1, 6-3, 6-7, 7-1, 7-3, 7-4: The next day, Derek Stiles did not show up at Caduceus USA. It was only one mistake... But its consequences were more than he could bear. Possessing the Healing Touch made it all the more difficult to accept.
- The death of Emilio is already a sad moment considering things were getting better at that point. Even worse is that after that incident, Derek gets a scolding from Angie who calls him out for overestimating the power of the Healing Touch and having a patient die because of it. The other doctors try to nullify Angie's bitterness by saying the incident would've happened to them if they were in Derek's spot, but Stiles sided with Angie's words more than them. In the next chapter, Derek recalls back to Hoffman's word from the first game, and while trying to treat Adel for a disease he contracted from in the first chapter, he loses his Healing Touch. Granted, things improve over time, but it's no wonder why Angie's occasional harsh words toward Derek made her a divisive character in the series.
- The aftermath of the incident causes Derek to be reassigned back to his old hospital for the remainder of Chapter 4, where we see that he's clearly a shell of his former self and struggling to keep up with basic tasks. It isn't until Blackwell's PGS manifests that he's finally able to come to terms with and start moving past Emilio's death.
- To add insult to injury, this was the fourth operation Derek has performed on Emilio, ALL of which involved GUILT and he loses Emilio to Kyriaki, the first GUILT Derek had operated on. The first pathogen that changed Derek and Angie's lives forever takes away a patient whose life was stolen by GUILT.
- The true Tragic Villain nature of Patrick Mercer. His wife Tracy was involved in an accident that left her comatose, and no matter what he and the medical community tried, they couldn't find a way to restore her consciousness. In his desparation to help her, he began to try and create more mutualistic strains of GUILT that could not only bring her back, but also help enhance the field of medicine. Sadly, his Neo-GUILT proved to be just as dangerous as the original strains, and he has to watch as Tracy nearly dies because of his illegal research. Once he realizes his work has failed to do what he set out to do, he attempts to take his own life by blowing up his facility, before ending up gunned down by the police. Even his taunts and dialogue in the X missions tend to be more somber, speaking about how modern doctors still have their limits, and his belief in the necessity of Neo-GUILT to help those with terminal conditions.
New Blood
- Master Vakhushti has not had an easy life. Having left his home in the Caucasus region to study medicine in Russia and America, becoming an accomplished surgeon and starting a medical company along the way, he returned to his motherland to help its people... only to be betrayed and nearly assassinated by his own government. The betrayal, combined with contracting malignant diencephalic sclerosis, drove Vakhushti into madness. Wanting revenge against the world and searching for a cure for his condition led to him collaborating and recruiting other members of influence to secure and research the bioweapon Stigma. His Stigma-derived cure, Cardia, only worsened his madness to cult-like levels. Unlike Adam and his progeny who willingly sought to bring death to the world, Vakhushti was simply a desperate man who wanted to save lives driven mad.
Trauma Team
- Despite the humor, the Diagnosis missions all are pretty sad in how each one has a bleaker and bleaker outcome for Gabe's patients. It's easy to see why Gabe became so cynical. For specifics:
- In "The Simplest Truth", Joshua didn't even recognize his own father, just calling him "Doctor" like every other doctor he's been to. To make things worse, his final diagnosis is Wermer’s Syndrome, a genetic disease passed down by the father. This alone explains why Gabe destroys his office in a subsequent meltdown, saying that he can’t "make him happy as a father" and later ends his relationship with his wife. It’s one of the very few moments when Gabe's Chew Toy status really took a turn for the worse. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the end of the last mission showing him working at Resurgam (despite his plans to retire away from the hospital), which could mean he didn't end up going through with the divorce, or at least will stay close to Joshua to watch over him from afar.
- The final segment of "Proud One" has the soldier you're examining deteriorate quickly, but he still holds on to help you refine the diagnosis. The final conversation is no longer about trying to figure out what's going on, but to provide hope and comfort in his dying moments. After you finish the level, it's confirmed he doesn't make it in the end.
- Claire's near-death after the freak mall shooting. Thankfully, she got better.
- While the theme of the Forensics mode is sad in general, some of the missions are especially painful once you uncover the truth.
- The Second Mission: A young girl falls ill with a disease that slowly destroys her from the inside and out, to the point where she has no friends remaining and her parents are terrified of her violent outburst to the point that they lock her up in her own room. She dies in horrible pain, clawing her hands at the locked door until they are bleeding, and calling desperately for mom and dad to comfort her pain, a call that's never answered.
- Some people feel more sorry for the parents; the girl's mother was so badly injured in one of the girl's outbursts that her sight was permanently damaged. Naomi treating them as the villains in the case seems extremely sour, but the fact that Naomi herself is about to die in a possibly similar painful way is context that should not be ignored. It is also heavily implied that the parents let their daughter die on purpose because they just wanted the problem to go away. Naomi probably shouldn't have been that hard on them, but it's not like they did nothing to deserve it.
- The Third Mission: An elderly woman is infected with a tumor that causes hallucinations. She ends up sincerely believing that the world has been condemned by God. She kills her daughter to save her immortal soul, then tries to kill her husband in the same manner, but fails and dies in the following struggle. Her daughter's last words is the desperate plea for her mother to flee and save herself. The woman's last words suggest the sincere belief and regret that she couldn't "save" her husband. And the old man himself sits alone, wanting nothing more than for his wife to be remembered as the good woman she was.
- The Last Mission: A young girl has a special virus within her that is dangerously lethal, and which her loving adoptive father hopes to convert to a cure for many of the diseases of the world. But he gets infected with the virus, and as the disease eats away at his sanity, he ends up killing his adoptive daughter in the hope to end the virus with her. And yet in doing so, he gave the virus a means to spread. Naomi herself admits that their story ended in the most tragic way possible.
- The Second Mission: A young girl falls ill with a disease that slowly destroys her from the inside and out, to the point where she has no friends remaining and her parents are terrified of her violent outburst to the point that they lock her up in her own room. She dies in horrible pain, clawing her hands at the locked door until they are bleeding, and calling desperately for mom and dad to comfort her pain, a call that's never answered.
- The first six bonus scenes, unlocked by finishing the game, are pretty humorous incidents in each of the doctors' lives after the events of the game. The seventh is of Rosalia and Professor Sartre. Rosalia is planning out the flowerbed which she died in and is talking about how she hopes that her brother (CR-S01) and "big sis" (Maria) can come visit them. Obviously, Sartre has doubts about CR-S01 wanting to even look him in the eye after what he did to him, but Rosalia reassures him that he'll forgive him. Rosalia never get to see her brother and big sis again, and Sartre never lives to hear CR-S01's forgiveness.
- CR-S01's life in general. Framed for a crime he did not commit by his own adoptive father, he is given a life sentence and imprisoned when he was only a teenager. The psychological strain and the peculiar nature of his cell left him physically unable to smile until the very end of the game. During Patient Zero, he finds out that the only two people he could ever call his family are both dead - and speaking of, his birth parents feared him for his stunted expressiveness and believed him to be a potential murderer. And despite his heroic actions, he still went back to jail at the end of the game (though he's still allowed to perform surgeries to reduce his sentence). It's enough to make you just want to give the poor guy a hug.
