As someone who has been a longtime fan of the Trauma Center series and has delved lightly into the Life & Death DOS medical simulation series that preceded it, my interest was immediately piqued upon learning of the comparable (to the latter) Emergency Room series recently thanks to a rather cool person, something that also left me wondering how I had managed to remain ignorant of it all this time. When I saw that one of them was on DS, I had to try it.

To make a long story short, it's a fair product for what it is. The controls and gameplay flow are honestly not that far off from what DS Trauma Center is, at least until the super-parasites show up in those games and everything goes off the rails. You play as a rising paramedic (named Troy Baker, incidentally, total lack of in-game voice acting notwithstanding), which means that all the procedures you do are of the first response stabilization variety rather than any fancy exams or OR procedures. You're given a set of stylus-based medical tools to play with and a workflow that you get used to fairly quickly as you try to apply it to various situations, though you always have the option to ask your senior partner what you're supposed to be doing which also feels a good bit like Trauma Center.

Something a bit unique is that you're also asked for a multiple choice diagnosis at the end of each case, something that no part of the actual game prepares you for, which leads me to wonder whether there was anything about that in the game manual (which, frustratingly, doesn't seem to have any available scans online— anyone want to be a hero?). All this contributes to an overall score and ranking (hey, like in Trauma Center!), though that doesn't really seem to matter at all unless you get a remarkably low one, which means that you either fail or just get yelled at. From what little I've seen of the original DOS/PC Emergency Room games, that's rather a far cry from their cheesy live-action FMV cutscenes that have the characters cracking wise at you for your incompetence.

Counting the tutorial, there's 30 different procedures to go through, though it's not terribly challenging overall, especially compared to Trauma Center, so it goes by fairly quickly— it's definitely the "breeze through a level during a trip to the toilet" kind of handheld game. The exception to this comes on the very last mission, which feels like the weak point of the game because of a few design oversights which render it unnecessarily frustrating, an opinion which certainly seems to be shared by the handful of other people who played this game— and managing to clear it just leads to a very short and unceremonious ending, though it's not like any other part of the writing in this game is particularly stellar.

Overall, it's nothing too special, but an interesting little curiosity of a title on the obscure DS games library. One thing that might be worth remarking on is the music, which, while nowhere near Trauma Center level (who the hell ever heard of that 'Persona' guy? Get off the stage!), was fairly nice, though the lack of a staff roll or viewable credits does lead me to suspect that it might be stock. Still, it is what it is.