Trauma Center: Under the Knife Director Kazuya Niinou on the Game’s Development History
Up until now, the Atlus Atlas has had a dedicated focus on Shin Megami Tensei and Persona ephemera. This isn’t particularly intentional so much as just a natural consequence of Atlus’ output being dominated by those two franchises. But near and dear to my heart is the Trauma Center series, as well, especially its Wii incarnations. After starting a new run of Trauma Team for the first time since I beat it during launch, I realized there weren’t necessarily a whole lot of translated interviews about the series and its development history, which I find to be something of a shame given its unique place as one of the better showcases of both the DS and Wii’s unique control schemes.
That’s where this translated interview conducted by Nintendo Inside comes into play, which you can find below. Conducted with the first DS game’s director Kazuya Niinou, it’s not very long, but as an initial taste of hopefully more Trauma Center content to come in the future, hopefully it’s at least informative about the series’ history, some of which I didn’t know about. I’m going to try and make a more concerted effort to feature more Trauma Center content when I can make time for it, so wish me luck in pursuing bigger pieces from here.
Trauma Center: Under the Knife Q&A
April 16, 2005
By OKOK, show, and Spelunker
Trauma Center: Under the Knife is an upcoming game set to release for the Nintendo DS on June 16 that revolves around the world of medicine. For this interview, we decided to drop by developer Atlus to have a chat with director Kazuya Niinou about the game. We’ll publish our formal impressions of the game later, but suffice it to say, it’s shaping up to be a great game that’s worth keeping an eye out for once it’s out!
Nintendo Inside: Could you briefly describe what the game is for our readers?
Kazuya Niinou: Sure. Trauma Center: Under the Knife is a science fiction game of sorts where doctors wage war on a mysterious parasite known as GUILT. It’s the first game of its kind to come to the DS, making it a rather unique game, if I do say so myself.
How did Trauma Center even come about in the first place?
In a nutshell, I’d wanted to somehow make a game about surgery in the past and when I learned about what the DS was capable of, I felt like the time had come for me to finally make it. The hardware just couldn’t be a better fit for it. The fact we can work with both dual screens and a stylus has helped realize the game’s potential beyond my wildest imagination.
Would you describe it as more of an action game rather than an adventure one, then?
I would, yeah. It’s not that I don’t get why some people might think it’s an adventure game. There are a lot of elements in the screenshots we’ve released that definitely resemble those sorts of games. But at the end of the day, the story exists in Trauma Center primarily in service of the gameplay experience, to give players a sense of purpose and make things more exciting for them. Obviously, the deeper you get into the game, the more we ratchet the drama of it all and hopefully players will enjoy that, but at the end of the day, it’s meant to be an action game, so the story can’t get in the way of that action or else it’s failed to do its job as a game.
That being said, there’s also been a trend in games lately to have no real loss state whatsoever and just essentially let players keep moving forward until they reach the end. Trauma Center isn’t that sort of game. We’ve limited the number of hints players can find on purpose in favor of just letting them learn the mechanics more organically as they play through levels repeatedly. Some players might think that’s a little harsh, but I’d argue that it makes the act of pulling off tricky surgeries in the game that much more satisfying.
When did initial planning for the game start?
The core concept of a surgery action game itself was something that we’d been looking into for several years, but it wasn’t until around spring last year that we settled on making it for the DS. The actual planning for the game then started around last summer.
Did you and the team get any inspiration from medical dramas while making the game?
Of course. There were a lot of things that we looked at while making the game such as shows like ER, Chicago Hope, and various Japanese TV series, as well as comics. But even knowing that, Trauma Center has its own distinct flavor to it, so in the end, when it came to the actual storyline we came up with, there wasn’t much material from other people’s works that we ended up drawing upon.
Was there anything about developing a surgical game specifically that made it uniquely hard compared to other kinds of games?
Definitely. It took us a long time for us to figure out what we were going to do about the graphics in particular. Early on, the game was pretty gory in its depictions of surgery. We also tried more of a deformed visual style, but in the end, we settled upon the more placid visuals you see in the final game. Even then, just by sheer virtue of the kind of game Trauma Center is and the overall setting it has, the style we adopted still means we couldn’t shoot for an all ages demographic when it came time to start marketing the game. [Indeed, in the end, the game was given a 12 rating by CERO, putting it roughly in line with a T rating from the ESRB.]
Were you aware of the existence of Kenshuui Tendou Dokuta [a Spike-published medical game released as part of the Nintendo DS’ Japanese launch] as you were making Trauma Center?
I was, yeah. But that game is one I’d consider to be much more in the adventure game camp, whereas, again, Trauma Center is pretty firmly in the action side of things. I don’t really view them as competing games in that sense.
How long do you expect it to take players to beat the game?
If you get to be as knowledgeable about the game’s inner workings as us developers, then you can probably beat it in around six hours like we have. That’s probably unrealistic for most players going through it their first time, though. After all, there are over 40 surgeries to perform in the game and you often have things that crop up mid-surgery, not to mention the more marathon procedures that’ll take a while just to get through in general.
It’s a pretty hard game as a result of all that, but, like I said, I think that just makes victory that much sweeter when you attain it. There are a lot of hidden nuances and tricks of the trade you can pick up along the way to improve your skills, too, which I think is a lot of fun. Really, it’s one of those games that you can only really understand by sitting down and playing it, so I hope readers at least give it a shot. We think we’ve made something pretty special here.
