An Overly Analytical Review of My 2014 Final Fantasy XIII Fanfiction
I was feeling rather nostalgic recently, so I decided to dig up an old Final Fantasy XIII fanfiction that I wrote way back in 2014 titled Tokyo Noir1. It’s a supernatural mystery story based on the characters from FF13, but takes place in the real world as opposed to the fantasy world in the original videogame. It’s probably the only piece of fanfiction I published publicly online; the rest remain unpublished because they are either too short or not worth sharing.
In this review, I’ll go through some background and inspiration behind the story to give you an idea behind my thought process when I first wrote it. Then, I’ll critique my younger self’s writing now that I have more than 10 years’ worth of life experience and hindsight. Some details and observations might be inaccurate due to me forgetting or misremembering key facts, so I suggest treating this review like a historian interpreting and contextualising past events.
SPOILER WARNING: Tokyo Noir is relatively short at only 6 chapters including an interlude. I never finished writing it. While I encourage you to read it to get the most out of this review, feel free to skip it. You don’t need to play through FF13 to enjoy it either. I merely used the characters from the game as a springboard for the story I wanted to tell. I will warn you that Tokyo Noir is not my best writing and contains plenty of rough edges, as you would expect from a teenage writer.
Still reading? This is your last chance to read Tokyo Noir before the actual review.
Now, without further ado…
Inspiration
I wrote Tokyo Noir during a time when I was going through a partial writer’s block2. Back then, I couldn’t seem to come up with interesting original stories, let alone interesting characters, so I did the next best thing: I borrowed characters from an existing work and wrote a piece of fanfiction.
As you can tell from the cover image I used on fanfiction.net, I was a huge Playstation fan. I played FF13 on Playstation 3 and became obsessed with the sci-fi fantasy world and the characters it introduced. Although the game has many flaws, it holds a special place in my heart as the JRPG that my younger brother and I bonded over.
Speaking of the PS3, the title Tokyo Noir was a shameless ripoff of L.A. Noire, another PS3 title that I badly wanted to play at the time, but never had the chance to play. I am a huge sucker for stories with overarching mysteries that slowly unravel as the protagonists discover more clues that lead to new and exciting revelations. My main inspirations include Capcom’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
A more obvious inspiration is 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I had picked up that book at a bookfair after reading a review about it in the newspaper. It was my first introduction to the magical realism genre, where strange occurrences like live fish raining from the sky and talking animals happen without explanation in a real world setting. Coincidentally, the story of 1Q84 takes place in Tokyo, but I don’t remember if the book played any part in my decision to set Tokyo Noir in the same city.
Setting
Tokyo Noir takes place in modern day Tokyo. However, my portrayal of Tokyo in the story isn’t very accurate. The characters aren’t very Japanese either. I definitely took many creative liberties with the story, opting to focus on storytelling over making the setting believable. It seems to portray Tokyo as a crime-ridden, car-centric city when the opposite is true, especially in current day Tokyo. At the time, I probably wasn’t too interested in making my version of Tokyo based on reality. I’d give my past self a pass, but otherwise I should have done at least a bit of research.
Characters
Tokyo Noir borrows 6 characters from FF13, namely Lightning Farron, Serah Farron, Sazh Katzroy, Hope Estheim, Oerba Dia Vanille (renamed Vanille Oerba) and Oerba Yun Fang (renamed Fang Yun). It also borrows 2 other characters to a lesser extent, namely Snow Villiers (mentioned only as Snow) and Bartholomew Estheim. Of the 6 core characters, each of them retain the same personality as their original videogame version.
My original side characters are basically two-dimensional plot devices. Yoyuri Mizu and Yumiko Shinze, both police officers and colleagues to Lightning, don’t have much characterisation outside delivering information. Yoyuri Mizu is depicted as the veteran chief police officer while Yumiko Shinze is depicted as the girly younger cop. It seems that I had attempted to give Yumiko some semblance of a character by describing her as a manipulative interrogator, but it was told rather than shown to the reader.
Plot
Other than the interlude between Chapters 4 and 5, the story is told in a first-person perspective from Lightning’s point of view. Lightning, a police officer working for the Tokyo Police Department, is on her day off when she learns about a missing teenager case. The missing person is Hope, a student from the school where her sister, Serah teaches at. Hope’s classmate, Vanille shows up at Lightning’s doorstep and tells her about witnessing Hope getting kidnapped by so-called “aliens”.
The next day, Vanille is brought by her guardian, Fang to the police station for questioning. During the interrogation, Vanille recalls something the aliens did to her but suddenly passes out, “vomiting a thick gooey mass of sludge”. She is admitted into the hospital. Later that day, Lightning and Serah visit Vanille at the hospital’s ICU ward.
At the police station the following day, Lightning finds out that another person has been kidnapped by the alien creatures, but this time there were multiple witnesses. While on street patrol duty, Lightning has a brief exchange with her colleague, Sazh about rumours on the recent kidnappings before being interrupted by a police radio dispatch to respond to a student protest nearby.
They rush off to the scene of the protest to find the protesters demanding the real truth behind the kidnappings. Lightning and Sazh try to disperse the protesters to no avail. As the situation escalates, the protesters begin screaming and running away as a girl gets snatched by a “spindly, grotesque creature” and disappears behind a building.
And that’s where the story ends in its incomplete state. Admittedly, the plot isn’t all that original. It does have a “monster of the week” structure where some unknown threat is discovered and slowly causes trouble for the protagonists. I don’t think my younger self had intended it, but it’s interesting that the story turned out that way.
Writing Style
My writing style at the time was heavily influenced by J. K. Rowling. I can definitely see signs that my teenage self wrote it. The writing is littered with half-baked and overgeneralised observations about the world, forced dialogue between characters, not to mention an overreliance on cliffhangers to progress the plot. After so many years, I still remember the outline of the story, just that I don’t remember the exact details. What surprised me is the fact that my past self is able to keep my present self invested in the story. The writing, while awkward in some places, flows smoothly from one sentence to the next.
One of the most interesting parts of the writing is the use of vivid imagery to convey certain emotions. Take this snippet from Chapter 1:
Beyond the rivulets of raindrops that covered the window glass, I could see the congested highway. It must have moved a little the last time I glanced at the window, but my immediate thought now is that none of the vehicles had advanced in the last half hour. Everything just seems frozen in time, like insect specimens trapped in amber, unchanging throughout the ages.
I wouldn’t have expected my younger self to have written this metaphor for being stuck in place. Perhaps it was a reflection of my state of mind at the time? Thinking back, I was most likely going through a tough time when I wrote this, though I can’t be too sure if it was related to an existential crisis I experienced around this stage of my life.
Here’s another interesting snippet from Chapter 2:
I always liked the idea of parallel universes. They open up numerous possibilities, each one either horrifying or wonderful or both at the same time. Imagine a universe where Serah is not my sister and we are standing on opposite sides of the street, waiting for the traffic lights to signal for pedestrians to cross the road. We’ll walk past each other at the zebra crossing without the smallest acknowledgement towards the other party, as complete strangers do, having no idea whatsoever that we are indeed related in another alternate reality. Now that’s cool.
This snippet isn’t as poetic as the first one, but still conveys an interesting idea. From Schrödinger’s cat to the Chinese room, I’ve always enjoyed a good thought experiment. Parallel universes remind me of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, a book which told its story in non-chronological order, such that each chapter feels like its own alternate reality. That’s how I interpreted it, at least.
As of writing Tokyo Noir, I had been writing as a hobby for about 4 years. Overall, I can definitely see my writing style taking shape. While I wasn’t expecting much from this fanfiction at the time, I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort my younger self put into writing it.
What I Would Have Written Differently
Much like the English localisation of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy that I partially drew inspiration from, Tokyo Noir presents a rather Americanised version of Tokyo. I could change the setting to America just like the Phoenix Wright games and the story would fit right in. My younger self had tried to make the story feel Japanese by mentioning Japanese elements including names and car brands. It feels oddly superficial, but I think it is a common mistake younger writers make when they are writing about cultures other than their own. In my effort to make the story sound remotely Japanese, I had created a poor facsimile of Japanese life.
I would have definitely done some research before writing a more realistic depiction of Tokyo. I could have put in more thought and nuance into the characters and setting to make the story more rooted in reality. My only issue with doing research is that I tend to stick too closely to the facts at the expense of creative expression.
In terms of story and pacing, I would have preferred to drag out the scenes and give the characters more room to breathe. Each scene would be carefully crafted to be entertaining to the reader while not overstaying its welcome. Even today, I still struggle to properly pace scenes for fear of boring the reader, so this is certainly an area of improvement for my present self.
In Chapter 5, I included a student protest, which is another nod to Haruki Murakami. The escalation felt too abrupt, so it’s no wonder that I ran out of steam after writing this chapter. I should have created more buildup towards the student protest by describing some form of dissent either offline or online, where characters start to question the authorities. I could have highlighted how misinformation could have easily distorted the facts leading to wild conspiracy theories. That could have been fun to write, now that I think about it.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this far, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this review. It is quite the departure from the first few essays I posted on Silicon Dreams. I’m pleasantly surprised that this fanfiction still holds up quite well despite its age. My old writing tends to be very clunky and oftentimes cringy, so I’d be too embarrassed to share it with anyone. Tokyo Noir balances my amateur writing with the earnestness of a young writer trying his best to post his work on the Internet.
This has been a fun throwback to my earlier work that you can find in the wild. I am really looking forward to reviewing more of my older works and maybe even posting original fiction on this blog. The possibilities are endless!
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