Suture me with a pitchfork, I've just passed the X1 Kyriaki mission of Trauma Center after having battered myself ineffectually against it for a week. And this on the attempt when I only started it to pass some time and was thinking up all sorts of titles to say I was giving up. This post was almost called "A strange game - the only winning move is not to bother".

Before I had even thought of trying this game, someone made the rather extravagant claim on one of the boards I read that Trauma Center was far more difficult than going through medical school. Naturally, I replied to the effect that if I ever fell over from a heart attack and someone shouted "Don't worry, I've S-ranked the Sin missions twelve times", then I wouldn't fancy my chances of waking up again. But I can sort of see what he meant now - I went into the game thinking that I was a toughened games player over 20 years that could take on a game that was known not to utterly spoon-feed you, but I was very wrong and found that Atlus more than deserved their diabolical reputation. In fact, I was first struggling through the last chapter of the main game thinking "Oh, this run of operating on creepy bald children is quite a nice way of tying the bonus really hard missions into the plot of the game" before realizing that those were what the game's makers considered to be the ones of medium difficulty.

The first vaguely consistent approach that I tried throughout my unsuccessful efforts was using the Healing Touch right before dealing with the last large cut at the beginning (preparing it to be sutured, drawing the star, and then finishing it off at lightning speed). I hadn't realized until this operation that the amount of slowed-down time you get depends on how rubbish you draw the star - when done well, I could easily deal with the grievous amount of harm that were caused by the first five Kyriaki by alternating between the stabilizer and lasering them as quickly as possible, then go back into normal time when about halfway through repairing the damage. After which the final section, with just one normal one and the mother, rapidly killed me every time, followed by Adam telling me that "You cannot overcome the power of death!", and I was inclined to agree.

It took a complete change of tactic to finally get past it, doing something that I previously thought was impossible and getting past the first two waves and the slashathon that they caused without using the Healing Touch. Realizing that the antibiotic gel could be used to slow down vital loss and even had some curative effect helped a lot here, as did the way that the game slowed down dramatically when drawing the semitransparent gel clouds. I had tried this approach a number of times before on the later section, but I couldn't get it to really affect the inevitability of massive vital loss - but something just clicked somehow, this time.

Of the very long list of frustrating things about this mission, I really hate the way that the Kyriaki disappear so quickly after they're found via ultrasound that you have to scalpel them out immediately, leaving no time for anything else such as... another ultrasound. Fortunately I managed to get them all out without losing any (which is a disaster) and went my usual laser route, alternating between that, the antibiotic gel, and the stabilizer, switching between the two curative items when the other ran out. In this way I was honestly surprised at how high I could keep the vitals - I had struggled around the single digits on every attempt before, but if I hung around doing it I could easily keep them up in the 50s this time. Daring to stop for just long enough to get the second set of two out, I stitched everything but one cut up and paused the game to allow my hands to stop shaking.

The next stage was the important part - I still had the advantage of being able to slow down time where I couldn't before, but even though I'd said that it would be easy if I still had it at this stage, I wasn't so sure about that now. Nevertheless, I went through the same procedure as if I was starting the whole mission - star, suture, and wait for the destruction.

It was fairly horrifying how quickly the twenty or so seconds of slowed time seemed to run out, but I managed to deal with the smaller of the two sharks fairly quickly, and was left with two hits on the larger one (which hides when you laser it) along with another pile of cuts to deal with when time returned to normal. I've honestly no idea how I actually managed this - just that after getting into the rhythm of gel, stabilizer, attempt to find it, stab stab stab, somehow it happened. When "DEFEAT!" finally came up, I was then immensely worried about still failing the mission because of the injuries, especially as time was beginning to run out - and tried to keep one eye on the vitals and one eye at where I was pointing as I stitched everything up at lightning speed.

I've got to say that after that it was impossibly relieving to finally zoom out to the medium view of the patient and be invited to close the incision. Suture, don't bother with the gel, put the bandage on quick, and the operation was finished with fifteen seconds to spare.

The mission pretty much cements my view of Kyriaki as my least liked operation in general, but it's also taught me that it really isn't that bad at all in the main game compared to what I thought of them when I started. I went back to the mission where you have to treat five separate people with slightly less aggressive forms of the same parasite, where I initially managed to get up to four patients before the time ran out (it lets you continue to the end of the one you're on when time is up) - this time I could zap and heal everything in about a minute and a half each and finished with two whole minutes left to spare and an operation score of 9999. Which still only earned me an "A" rank.

The next X-mission is Deftera, which I've tried and failed only a couple of times. I think that a bit of that strain depends on luck - you're meant to herd opposite-coloured clouds together, but you never seem to be able to point them in exactly the direction you intend and it's down to chance whether it's easy or difficult to keep everything where you want it. It also feels strangely like I'm just not putting any effort into it, after the frenzy of X1 - without flames coming off the tip of the stylus as I frantically go from antibiotics to scalpel to stabilizers to laser, I keep on thinking that there's something else I should be doing.