while it has its charm using the ds' touch screen abilities to its potential by making a surgery game, it's extremely hard and at times gets aggravating.
i know difficult games are a thing that many of us love, but its bad when you go on youtube for help because the stages fuck you over continuously and people are talking about how they quit the game because it was too hard. some of those people have resorted to using action replay, which i also ended up doing because of the original game's difficulty. some of the levels feel impossible for human beings to do unless they have extremely fast reflexes or strong wrists. like, i can not inject 5 aneurysms at once when i'm at the age where my wrists are far more frail. i'm not risking carpal tunnel to beat a difficult stage.
you'd think that with action replay this will be 'enjoyable'. no, you for some reason, this game makes you DIFFUSE A BOMB when you're a doctor, which takes many losses to actually understand how to diffuse it (yes, even with ign's walkthrough). you also can't use action replay for this stage either, it's literally 'do things as fast as humanly possible or everyone dies'. what's even worse is that the lady that helps you diffuse it has experience diffusing bombs. so why throw this all on the rookie? why does she have to force you to do it? (for gameplay reasons, but i digress)
which brings us to the plot. you play as derek styles, a 26 year old 'rookie' doctor who gets a barrage of insults even if you do the surgery right when he's improving his skill and you're beating every stage with no problem. however, this finally stops when its revealed he gets a 'healing touch' that slows down time to save patients. only then do his co-workers actually start being nice to him... for some reason.
like yes, he has done numerous surgeries beforehand. but it was only when his ability showed up that his coworkers suddenly saw him in a positive light. someone on here basically mentioned that derek suddenly upgrading from a rookie surgeon to working at caduceus was unrealistic and i have to agree. actually, why did the doctors suddenly force him from minor arm surgery to doing surgeries that can actually threaten peoples lives if not done proper. WTF?
then theres the reveal of GUILT, the man-made viruses and one of the more fascinating parts of the plot. for the most part, they're pretty easy to take down. but the one with the triangles is the worst one out of all of them. it took me forever to figure out how to kill those.
perhaps atlus wanted to make this game painfully tricky to emphasize to the normal every day crowd on just how hard surgeons have it. though i highly doubt this was the case with the inaccuracies of the career itself in the game with derek. i wanted to like this game, especially with the creative surgery concept. i really did. especially since i love how ds games experimented with the touch screen capabilities. the music in the game is amazing and i love the 2000s campy anime art this game has. maybe sometimes these surgeries can be fun, but for the most part they're too tricky. the game is really hard to enjoy or recommend.
i was actually introduced to this game with the wii version my mom had gotten the family when i was really young, though i mainly watched my brothers play it and don't know the difficulty. hopefully it's a lot better than the original ds version.
i know difficult games are a thing that many of us love, but its bad when you go on youtube for help because the stages fuck you over continuously and people are talking about how they quit the game because it was too hard. some of those people have resorted to using action replay, which i also ended up doing because of the original game's difficulty. some of the levels feel impossible for human beings to do unless they have extremely fast reflexes or strong wrists. like, i can not inject 5 aneurysms at once when i'm at the age where my wrists are far more frail. i'm not risking carpal tunnel to beat a difficult stage.
you'd think that with action replay this will be 'enjoyable'. no, you for some reason, this game makes you DIFFUSE A BOMB when you're a doctor, which takes many losses to actually understand how to diffuse it (yes, even with ign's walkthrough). you also can't use action replay for this stage either, it's literally 'do things as fast as humanly possible or everyone dies'. what's even worse is that the lady that helps you diffuse it has experience diffusing bombs. so why throw this all on the rookie? why does she have to force you to do it? (for gameplay reasons, but i digress)
which brings us to the plot. you play as derek styles, a 26 year old 'rookie' doctor who gets a barrage of insults even if you do the surgery right when he's improving his skill and you're beating every stage with no problem. however, this finally stops when its revealed he gets a 'healing touch' that slows down time to save patients. only then do his co-workers actually start being nice to him... for some reason.
like yes, he has done numerous surgeries beforehand. but it was only when his ability showed up that his coworkers suddenly saw him in a positive light. someone on here basically mentioned that derek suddenly upgrading from a rookie surgeon to working at caduceus was unrealistic and i have to agree. actually, why did the doctors suddenly force him from minor arm surgery to doing surgeries that can actually threaten peoples lives if not done proper. WTF?
then theres the reveal of GUILT, the man-made viruses and one of the more fascinating parts of the plot. for the most part, they're pretty easy to take down. but the one with the triangles is the worst one out of all of them. it took me forever to figure out how to kill those.
perhaps atlus wanted to make this game painfully tricky to emphasize to the normal every day crowd on just how hard surgeons have it. though i highly doubt this was the case with the inaccuracies of the career itself in the game with derek. i wanted to like this game, especially with the creative surgery concept. i really did. especially since i love how ds games experimented with the touch screen capabilities. the music in the game is amazing and i love the 2000s campy anime art this game has. maybe sometimes these surgeries can be fun, but for the most part they're too tricky. the game is really hard to enjoy or recommend.
i was actually introduced to this game with the wii version my mom had gotten the family when i was really young, though i mainly watched my brothers play it and don't know the difficulty. hopefully it's a lot better than the original ds version.