I've had a long history with the medical profession. I once enjoyed watching ER and other medical shows, but have ceased to watch them in favor of now only House and Grey's Anatomy. I was once going to go to college to be a doctor, then decided on paramedic, and then scrapped the whole field entirely to do paralegal. Of course, have never practiced a day as that once, because I'm here, writing this review, telling you why Trauma Center is such a great game for letting me live the life I once thought about.

THE STORY SO FAR
You play as Derek Stiles – a young surgeon – who has just found himself in a position at Hope Hospital. The problem is Derek isn't exactly the greatest doctor, not because he doesn't have skill, but because he cares too much about himself and not the patients. After a near close call, Dr. Stiles decides to get straight and put his priorities in order so that he can be the best doctor he can be.

On a seemingly ordinary day on the job, Dr. Stiles runs across GUILT (Gangliated Utrophin Immuno Latency Toxin) – a man made disease – that has claimed the lives of all who have come across it. After the power of his Healing Touch manifests itself (a special gift from the medical gods that allows him to work at enhanced speed as if time has slowed down) he cures the disease and suddenly finds himself being offered a position with an elite hospital tackling the most extreme cases and trying to combat GUILT. Will Dr. Stiles be able to make a difference in this war against GUILT?

I was a bit skeptical about the story of the game at first, thinking it would only be a string of ideas to pull the gameplay of the surgery together, but I actually found myself playing more and more so I could see what happens next in the story. Perhaps it has something to do with doctors being that middleman between whether or not someone continues to live or die and the fact that with the Wii controls, you really feel as if you are a surgeon working on your patients, but I was really compelled to never fail and found myself getting quite attached to the characters and even a bit emotional (not like boohoo cry my eyes out, but there was sadness over certain plights in the story).

The story also offers up something new all the time, such as a new heartbreaking patient story, new GUILT strains, a new twist on procedures, as well as a completely new side story with Dr. Nozomi Weaver, who finds herself helping the government treat patients they've been working on. In the end the Trauma Center story is a full package and is really a great time filled with emotion and conflict.

GAMEPLAY
The gameplay of Trauma Center: Second Opinion is all about one thing: performing surgeries (well, almost all the time, though you'll be using your tools and same ideas and principles from beginning to end).

The control style of Trauma Center is very fluid and easy to use, and out of the initial launch games for the Wii, it is the one that seems to nail the new control style the best. Trauma Center uses the nunchuk style, so you'll have to have that particular attachment, though that shouldn't be a problem since one came with the Wii system. The nunchuk part of the controller is almost used solely to select what instruments you'll be working with, as each directional push of the analog represents the positioning of a particular instrument. The only other time the nunchuk plays a different role is to activate the Healing Touch (hold Z button) and when you are using the new defibrillator (push both controllers in and press Z and B buttons at the same time to start a charge).

The Wii controller is the main controller for the game, as you'll use it to basically perform every task, such as scrolling through game text, but most importantly performing your surgeries. By moving the controller in front of the sensor bar, a little bright light will appear on the screen, telling you where your actions will take place on the screen. You'll use this pointer to do everything from designating where a laser blast will be pinpointed to where the center of an ultrasound will emanate from. You'll also use the controller to perform surgery cuts (trace the yellow line on screen to cut open the body) to using forceps to grab pieces of glass to tumors (holding A and B buttons to perform a clamp and use the controller to perform a removal action).

Though there are several actions you'll be performing, mostly you'll be disinfecting surgical areas, giving syringes of medicine to stop inflammation or improve vitals, stitch up a cut area (perform a cross/zigzagged line across cut), drain blood and puss, laser tumor growths, cut out foreign bodies, remove glass, etc. The procedures can sometimes be daunting when you don't know exactly what you need to do (thus requiring some experimentation), but I never once ran into an issue with the controls – not once.

Well, I'll take that back. For the most part, controls work flawlessly, with the only exception being when you have to activate your Healing Touch. To activate the Healing Touch, you must hold down both the Z and B buttons until the shape of a star appears on the screen. Once the shape appears, you'll then have to quickly draw the same shape using your Wii controller, so you'll be able to move faster and slow down time. The Healing Touch is a great feature, but I often had the hardest time properly drawing the symbol needed to activate the controls; whether this is the game's fault or my lack of artistic ability remains to be seen.

Though your toolsets never change, the way in which you use them do, meaning it doesn't feel like you are playing the same level over and over from beginning to end. For instance, using your drain will only be used to suck up excess blood early on, but later you'll need it to drain two GUILT strands once they merge up, and other such changing instances as those.

One thing I love about the game is that it is a challenge, but thanks to a smart move it is never too daunting. I like to play any game on the Normal difficulty setting, but even I found Normal in Trauma Center sometimes frustratingly hard; I can't tell you how many times I failed a surgery. However, once you choose a difficulty, the game doesn't make you stick by it to fully play a game. For instance, in one level, I kept losing a patient because I could never remove all the tumor growth and get rid of the tricky GUILT (even when I used my Healing Touch). After trying for so long and getting fed up, under normal circumstances I'd probably quit the game because I wouldn't want to spend another two hours going back to the beginning of the story just to play up to it again and hopefully beat it on a lower level. What the game does well is it plans ahead for these choke points, and lets you change the difficulty on the fly before you begin a level, so in this case I jumped down to Easy and beat that same stage on one try very easily, and then before I moved on to the next level, I bumped the difficulty back to Normal and got to continue on with my story without missing a beat. It is a wonderful feature, because it means I can keep experiencing the story without having to worry getting caught in an ultimate choke point where I'll never see the game to the end.

GRAPHICS
It's a good thing Trauma Center has a great story and gameplay, because the rest fail to live up to the package (though a lot of that is intentional and a style choice, because it is really the only way graphically to easily pull off this type of game). The character drawings look great and are very clean with that traditional manga/anime vibe, but the graphics of the gameplay is where it is lacking. The bodies you cut into aren't detailed, but rather are just general layouts of a man/woman/child's body, and the internal organs are simplified as well. Everything graphically about an operation looks okay, but nothing great; it does get the job done, however, and allows you to more easily operate.

SOUND
You'll only ever experience a few voice sound bytes, as almost all the game is text. The game also only really features about three songs: 1) The techno beat of in-between game events like reading the story, 2) The heartbeat infused dread music of an operation, and 3) The sad and reflective piano tune of a dramatic moment. The sound of the surgery also isn't too much, just enough bytes to properly get the job done.

IN CONCLUSION
Though the graphics and sound work fail to live up to high standards, the gameplay and story more than make up for it, and makes Trauma Center: Second Opinion a unique and fun game that any Wii fan owes it to themselves to try out. Trauma Center: Second Opinion will probably be overlooked early on for the more mainstream titles like Zelda, but if the original DS version is any indicator, this game could come in small supply and have a relatively short publishing life, so don't sleep on this game forever and let the chance to own this great game pass you by, because by the time you come around to buying it, it just might not be there.

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