Lifesigns: Poking and probing your way through internship

Every once in a while, between a hardcore dungeon crawler and a 70-hours long JRPG, I like to take a breath and relax by tackling a point-and click adventure game. This is actually my second favourite genre after the Holy Realm of RPG, and my taste in the matter is quite broad: I eagerly lap every point-and-click installment that comes my way, from cosy and laid-back affairs like Professor Layton to viciously twisted puzzlers like Myst. 

Lifesigns falls more on the relaxed end of the spectrum. Developed by Spike and released in 2005(jp), 2007(na) and 2008(eu), this rather innocent DS game is the perfect breather between two intense RPG playthroughs. It is actually the direct sequel to a game called Kenshuui Tendō Dokuta; as you may guess from the title, this first installment was released only in Japan, which makes the decision to release the second one worldwide a bit puzzling, especially since the story picks up directly from where it stopped at the end of the first game. Localization’s ways are sometimes mysterious, indeed.  

Anyway, this second installment follows the rocky second year of hospital internship of Dr Tendo, a young aspirant surgeon who finds himself entangled on a regular basic in all sorts of troubles and affairs—which often includes health issues, as one may expect. Yet surprisingly, there is much more talking than operating in that game. It tends to focus more on the relationships between the characters, the gossip about them and the quirky, funny or dramatic situations that unfold around them, all this treated in a very mundane and down-to-earth way. Think Scrubs rather than ER—albeit a very distinctively Japanese version of Scrubs. Lifesigns is actually pretty much the antithesis of the major surgical game series, the more famous Trauma Center. 

Does that mean that this game is a dull, boring affair? Well, no. While Lifesigns is by no mean one of the best titles on the DS, it’s also far from being one of the worst. It’s actually fairly average in all departments: from the generic, seen-a-million-times-before anime art style to the omnipresent elevator music, nothing shines or stands out to blow your mind. Yet, nothing is broken either, and the game manages to offer a solid and rather smooth experience, if not a tremendously original one. 

Lifesigns’s focus is most definitely centered on its storyline. Sure, you get to cut a few patients open; but let’s face it, you spend much, much more time running through the hospital and talking with every person you encounter in order to make the story progress. A story that actually manages to be quite entertaining, juggling effortlessly between tense, emotional and light-hearted moments. The game is divided in five episodes, each of them offering three different outcomes, and leading all in all to four different endings; this adds some interesting replay value to a title which would otherwise have very little. As for the characters, they are quite lively, quirky and entertaining, and manage to avoid being complete anime clichés. By the end of the game, I had actually grown quite fond of them, and I certainly won’t mind meeting them again for another playthrough of Lifesigns. That is, in a few months or years, when I’ve forgotten most of it. 

I would like to talk at length about the gameplay; but this is a point-and-click game after all, and a rather simple one at that, and there is really not much to talk about. As in many point-and-click games, you interact with people and objects by poking and prodding them, and watch as the story progresses and unfolds quietly through such interactions. The operations are more fast-paced affairs, requiring good timing and precision; yet, they are far from being as tricky as the ones featured in the Trauma Center series, and failing them is more likely to be due to the occasional lack of accuracy of the touch screen than to some inherent difficulty of theirs. It’s worth noting that failing an operation will grant you an immediate Game Over; but since the game always gives you the option to save before any operation, there is hardly any risk of losing your progress. There is, however, another Game Over occurrence in which you can lose a subsequent amount of your progression, and that takes place during a phase called “Convince”. This is some kind of minigame which must be cleared to advance the story: it requires you to convince a character to act a certain way by feeding them some specific pieces of data stored in your inventory (called “medical record”, for the sake of the hospital setting). These specific pieces of data must be presented in a specific sequence to achieve persuasion and clear the minigame; deviate too much from this sequence, or select the wrong pieces of data to start with, and the game will shove a Game Over in your face. Better make sure to save when you feel a Convince occurrence coming your way, if you don’t want to lose thirty minutes of your progression like I did once after I failed to Convince someone. 

There is a romance side to the game, but it would be absolutely far-fetched to describe Lifesigns as something even remotely akin to a romance sim. You can’t actively woo a potential love interest, and speaking to them as often as you can doesn’t seem to do the trick either. In fact, the requirements needed to end up dating a specific lady are murky at best, and seem to depend more on decisions made at some points in the story than on any active romancing on your part. I had my eye on Aoshima-san, my funny fellow intern obsessed with food, and tried to interact with her as much as I could during the game in the hope of finally dating her; and yet, for some unfathomable reason, I ended up instead dating Kurai-san, the weird operation room nurse with a creepy laugh. Oh, well. I’ll try to do things differently next time, and see who it will turn out. 

The only thing that really frustrated me in Lifesigns was the fact that many issues remain unresolved when the credits finally roll. The game ends up in a very open way, leaving a handful of important matters unaddressed, especially regarding relationships and other possibly more sinister plots hidden between closed hospital doors. This was very likely intentional, and was probably designed to pave the way for a third installment of the series. Alas, this hypothetical third installment was never released, neither in Japan nor anywhere else; and after so many years, there is very little chance that it will see the light of day. This lack of closure, combined to the fact that Lifesigns is the continuation of an ongoing story, gave me the vexing feeling of having caught a soap opera on the fly and watched a handful of episodes before it was abruptly cancelled, just when I was starting to get interested. Talk about disappointment.

Despite this, I would still recommend Lifesigns to any fan of point-and-click games. The genre’s popularity and representation is not exactly at its peak right now, and it would be a pity to pass on one of its members, especially since the DS and its touch screen are so, so perfectly tailored for point-and-click galore. Given that nowadays, you can get your hands on a copy of that game for just a handful of dollars, pounds, euros or whatever your currency is, there’s definitely no reason not to indulge in a bit of poking, probing, nipping and tucking. 

Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!