Trauma Team

Trauma Team is a video game that combines simulation gameplay with non-interactive visual novel storytelling using fully-voiced motion comic segments. The campaign is split between six medical-themed disciplines; surgery, emergency medicine, endoscopy, diagnosis, orthopedics and forensic medicine. Each of the six main characters have episodic storylines that interweave to form a larger narrative, with a seventh chapter involving all the characters once all six storylines are completed. Across each campaign, players control the action with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk.

Surgery and emergency medicine follow the gameplay pattern of earlier Trauma Center titles, with characters working under pressure to save patients. In the surgery segments, players operate on patients using a variety of tools, including scalpel, antibiotic gel and sutures. Players must perform a number of tasks to complete the operation while keeping vital signs stable. During the emergency medicine segments, the player must treat a number of patients with a basic set of tools while each patient loses health.

Trauma Team is set in the same fictional universe as the other Trauma Center titles, although there is little to no narrative connection. Most of the game is based in and around Resurgam First Care, a fictional hospital in Portland, Maine which many of the protagonists work at or visit.

The storyline follows six protagonists working at Resurgam. "CR-S01" is an amnesiac prisoner convicted of bioterrorism; due to his surgery skills, he begins working at Resurgam to take years off his sentence. Maria Torres is a bombastic paramedic whose perfectionism and independence has isolated her from her colleagues. Gabriel Cunningham is a diagnostician whose troubled personal life gives him a pessimistic view of humanity, and during the game he is reluctantly partnered with the AI system RONI.

Preproduction of Trauma Team began in 2007, following the completion of Trauma Center: New Blood. The concept was to create a gameplay experience unlike anything in the series. After much discussion, the team opted to combine a wide variety of medical practises into a single game. While director Daisuke Kanada himself described the concept as "pretty farfetched", the team felt Atlus were the ones best suited to successfully turning the concept into a game.

While initially planned as a sequel to the other Trauma Center titles, it was decided to change the title from the beginning of development, and by its completion the title had changed substantially from previous entries so that Kanada compared it more to an original title. The new Japanese title Hospital referenced the increased number of represented medical procedures. Kanada defined the game as a "conglomeration" of the series up to that point.

Upon its debut week in Japan, Trauma Team failed to reach the top 10 best-selling titles, coming in at 19th place. By the end of the year, the game had sold over 16,700 units, selling through just under 60% of its stock. In their fiscal summary of the period when Trauma Team released, Index Holdings did not include the game among their commercially successful titles at the time, which included Persona 3 Portable and Demon's Souls. Review aggregate Metacritic indicated that it received "generally positive" reviews, and it was considered among the best Wii games by Kotaku, GameZone, and Nintendo World Report.

The narrative was seen as generally enjoyable and more grounded than earlier entries despite still having some outlandish elements, and some noted poor pacing in the cutscenes. Writing for Kotaku, Stephen Totilo enjoyed how the narrative was structured, praising it as a rare example of non-linear storytelling in video games. Surgery was noted as a polished version of the series' previously established gameplay. Nintendo Power writer Chris Hoffman enjoyed the other modes of play, but found the surgical gameplay to be the highlight of the game.