When I think back to my childhood and teenage years, when my literary tastes were being forged in the crucible of youthful emotion and impressionism, particular scenes come to life: Sam carrying Frodo up Mt. Doom. The Reaper chasing Wil Ohmsford through the Westland. Marle hugging Crono on top of Death Peak.
Most fantasy readers wonât need a reminder of what books the first two scenes come from (Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks), and most Kotaku readers wonât miss the reference to the classic Japanese role-playing game Chrono Trigger. And for some, all three of those works are of equal importance. Todayâs fantasy novelists are just as likely to have been inspired by JRPGs as they are J.R.R. Tolkien. For some authors, Celesâ performance at the Opera House is just as much of a storytelling touchstone as young Simon fleeing Pryrates beneath the Hayholt.
Scott Lynchâs experience growing up with Japanese console RPGs âabsolutelyâ influenced his later writing, he said. âMost specifically, the grandeur and atmosphere the Final Fantasy games evoked through their blending of magic with technology, and via their use of Yoshitaka Amanoâs art and Nobuo Uematsuâs music.â
Lynch, 41, is one of fantasyâs most popular authors, with sales of over half a million copies of his 2006 book The Lies of Locke Lamora. What many of his fans might not know is that Lynch plucked the name for his titular character from Final Fantasy VIâs famous thiefâ errâtreasure hunter, Locke Cole.
Scott Lynch is not the only popular fantasy author who has taken inspiration from Japanese role-playing games. Several contemporary writers I spoke with for this story told me that the JRPGs of the 1990s played a huge part of their adolescence and have influenced their work for over 20 years, including Tamsyn Muir, Max Gladstone, and Peng Shepherd.
A New Medium
On Twitter, I post mainly about two things: gaming, and science fiction and fantasy (SFF) books. As these two streams cross, Iâve noticed how theyâre deeply entwined within the geek culture of 30-somethings. We grew up in an age where our childhood was equally filled with great books and the bleeding edge of the newly emergent video games field. But what is it about these golden-age JRPGs that specifically excited young readers in the 90s?
âVideo games take our minds to alternate worlds and parallel universes,â wrote critic Nadia Oxford in 2016. âWe meet fascinating people, struggle through epic conflicts, and interact with dragons and monsters. When we return to Earth, itâs not uncommon to feel a spark of inspiration that drives us to sit down at our keyboards, pick up a pencil, or break out our instruments.â
Due to misconceptions about video gamesâand their relative newness âmuch of the mediumâs ability to foster creativity, learning, critical thinking, and imagination is lost on many people. The worldâs first gamers are grandparents now, and weâre seeing the first generation of people who grew up knowing only a world with video games well into adulthood. Itâs becoming more and more obvious that the power of video games to inspire creators is not only present in modern society, but immensely integral to the works of many of todayâs young artists.
Alongside genres like point-and-click adventures and sprawling computer-based like Ultima and Baldurâs Gate, Japanese RPGs were at the forefront of wrapping their gameplay around a central narrative. The experience of playing these games was as much about the story as the systems and mechanics. JRPGs were also pulling a lot of narrative and world-building tricks that just didnât exist in fantasy literature of the 90s. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy looked to Western tabletop and computer RPGs for inspiration. With the influence of Eastern culture and a cavalier attitude toward established western tropes, Japanese creators like Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii were able to craft experiences that felt at once familiar and new. Bold. Interesting. Different.
âFinal Fantasy VII converted me,â said Troy L. Wiggins, 33, an SFF author and editor from Memphis, Tennessee. After Squareâs groundbreaking PlayStation RPG, he moved on to other games heâd love even more, like Suikoden II, Wild Arms, and Star Ocean: The Second Story.
âI logged, no lie, thousands of hours in Star Oceanâs campaign,â he said. âAll the stuff that I didnât want to try to understand a couple years earlier suddenly was suddenly all I could think about. Grinding to level characters to get access to Special Arts. Running over old maps to find treasures. Falling in love with the simple, earnest characters, the byzantine plots, the ways that these distinctly different characters contrasted with the ones I found [elsewhere.]â

Wigginsâ short fiction has appeared in many of speculative fictionâs most popular publications, including Uncanny Magazine and Strange Horizons. He is also the Executive Editor of the Hugo Award-nominated literary magazine FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
Japanese RPGs represented fantasy without boundaries. Xenogears proved no idea was too big, Phantasy Star IV was the culmination of a multi-generational epic told across two consoles, and Lunar: The Silver Star showed how personal stakes could be just as enthralling as world-changing conflicts. One look at epic fantasy literature these days, and itâs impossible to miss the impact this no-holds-barred creativity has had on todayâs writers.
Nintendo Generation
âI was a member of what you might call the Nintendo generation,â said Locke Lamora author Scott Lynch. Growing up near Saint Paul, Minnesota, he and his brothers worked paper routes to save up for an NES. âMy mother diligently stored the money in a manila envelope on which sheâd written INTENDO, bless her.â His early tastes revolved around action-based games like Mega Man 2 and Iron Tank, but that changed about a year later. âI made two simultaneous discoveries,â he said. âFinal Fantasy at the local rental shop, and the fact that I could successfully feign illness to stay home from school and play Final Fantasy.â
âI think the most advanced and complete story of the 90s JRPGs was undeniably Chrono Trigger,â said Lynch âIt is, by turns, whimsical, silly, mysterious, dark, and even frightening. It does a fantastic job of coherently integrating time travel, a story element which can easily get wildly out of control.â

Lynchâs work features many elements that would be instantly familiar to JRPG fans, including sprawling cities, lots of magic, and a tight-knit band of knaves clawing their way through the world led by a charismatic protagonist who comes complete with a hidden magical lineage.
Lynch sees a larger trend of young SFF authors being influenced by gaming and Japanese RPGs. âThose of us in western commercial SFF... were exposed to anime, tabletop roleplaying, Wuxia films, Bollywood, JRPGs,â he said. âYou know, all of these cultural currents that werenât part of the standard curriculum for nerds of, say, the 1950s. Thatâs just bog-standard change over time. First these things are fringe interests outside their initial target markets, then increasingly normalized subcultures, and then just baked in to the overall cultural landscape.â
Lynch made an interesting point when I asked him how golden-age JRPGs differ from fantasy literature of the same era. âI think the most important factor was the relative ages of the mediums,â he said. âWestern commercial fantasy at that point had established its model 25-30 years previously.â Lord of the Rings was a cultural phenomenon in the 60s, he said, but by the 70s, fantasy was more or less a niche market until Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson blew the lid off things with The Sword of Shannara and Lord Foulâs Bane respectively.
âJRPGs were still in what you might call their exuberant adolescenceâ in the 1990s, Lynch said. âThe NES and SNES JRPG phenomena had all happened in just the last decade, give or take. So I recall there being a real sense of play and experiment along with the ambitions toward epic storytelling and themes.â
JRPGs themselves were influenced by the Western fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. âI remember on the news channels weâd see about games like Dungeons & Dragons being played in America, and these fantastical stories about people dying for playing it too long, or how this game was amazing,â said Akitoshi Kawazu, creator of Square Enixâs SaGa game series, in a 2017 interview. âThat entered our circle. We got our own localized version, and we thought we had to give it a go.â
Before creating the SaGa series, Kawazu was also part of the small team led by Sakaguchi that created the original Final Fantasy, consciously making it closer to the âfantasy lore and settingâ of the Dungeons and Dragons series than its rival Dragon Quest was.
In a 2017 interview with Forbes, Final Fantasy director Hironobu Sakaguchi admitted that he looked toward Western RPGs for inspiration while developing Final Fantasy because he had no talent for action-based games. âI was thoroughly captivated by games such as Wizardry in the Apple II era, whose influence I cannot deny,â he said.â Sakaguchi also loved Western fantasy literature, being a particular fan of Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock.
Gideon Reaches Level 2
âMaybe the closest thing to a JRPG in novel form.â
When writer Isabel Yap tweeted this in January, I didnât know much about Tamsyn Muirâs upcoming debut novel, Gideon the Ninth. But I immediately had to know more. I asked Yap, who had read the novel in advance of its upcoming September release, what made her say that. âTwo things about Gideon the Ninth made me think of JRPGs,â she said. âIt is extremely cross-genre in a way Tamsyn once described to me as âthe kitchen sinkââit is a horror necromantic fantasy space opera, with large doses of humor, drama, and profanity. Youâve got technology, but youâve also got powerful magic, and itâs all held together by tone and an utter sense of wholeness in the world sheâs created.â

This should all ring true for Final Fantasy players, Yap said, who are very familiar with âtraveling in airships and buggiesâbut also riding chocobos,â or using a cell phone to change party members alongside mystical Materia and summoning spells.âAs a genre writer Iâve felt pressure to make my stories one thingâto suit an anthology theme, or submit to a certain market,â Yap said. Reading Gideon the Ninth was a ârefreshingâ experience, âsci-fantasyâ that feels organic and right.
Gideon the Ninth might be Muirâs debut novel, but sheâs a well-known staple of the SFF short fiction community thanks to her stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed. Her 2015 novelette âThe Deepwater Brideâ earned nominations for (among others) the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Before she was competing for awards, though, Muir cut her teeth writing âheapsâ of fan fiction about her favorite Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts characters.

âI donât know what it was about Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, but they took their humor seriously,â she said. âIn my teens I wrote long stories for Final Fantasy VII involving Yuffie Kisaragi dying of a wasting disease and stories in Final Fantasy IX where Iron-tail Fratley dealt with being a single father. These were the cowboy years. You could do anything.â
âWriting those stories made me who I am,â Muir said. âI wrote them so un-self-consciously. I loved the characters. I loved the settings. JRPG fandom made you feel like you could write these massive epics without shame,â she said.
Gideon the Ninthâs âcentral conceit, the cavalier-necromancer duo, can definitely be looked at as a reworking of the JRPG fighter-mage dichotomy,â said Muir. The book plays around with the familiar trope of a young protagonist starting off in a cozy village before winding up in a âspooky celestial final temple,â complete with âbig final bossâ that changes form as their health is depleted.
âGideon even begins the book by leaving her bed,â she said, a reference to the openings of so many JRPGs.
Fanfic Days
Fanfic is an art of its ownâhighlighted by the recent Hugo Award finalist Archive of Our Own, a fanfic hub that hosts a thriving video game community. Itâs also a common entry point into writing fantasy and science fictionânearly every writer I spoke with had a history with video game fanfic, and many didnât stop writing it even after they landed traditional publishing deals for their creator-owned work.
Peng Shepherdâs 2018 debut novel, The Book of M, tells an epic story of survival in a dystopic future Earth. It won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen by The Verge and Amazon as one of the best books of 2018.
âAs a kid, I devoured any kind of story in any medium,â Shepherd, 33, said. âBooks, movies, television, anecdotes from older relatives, gossip in permanent marker on the school bathroom walls. Iâd been yearning to write fiction of my own ever since then as wellâbut never got very far with anything. I could invent fantastical premises at the drop of a hat, but I didnât know how to build a narrative, or a world, or develop characters.â
The turning point, Shepherd said, was when she got a Super Nintendo at the age of 10. Her first game, recommended by her stepdad, was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Shepherd became obsessed with Nintendoâs action-adventure game, and took control of the narrative when the game ended. âWriting fanfic is a huge part of how I discovered that I wanted to be an author in the first place,â she said. âI loved living in those stories, building believable relationships between characters who hadnât interacted in the original game, and inventing new adventures to send them all on.â

âI donât even think I knew the term âfanficâ or that I was doing it until much later,â she said. âI just felt the overwhelming urge to keep the story going after I had beaten the gameâso I did. I wrote. A lot.â Her Zelda fanfic would eventually become âGame Of Thrones-level detailedâ and âintensely accurate.â Sheâd constantly reference back to the game to check minor details of the charactersâ physical appearance. âItâs obvious looking back now, but this is clearly where I learned basic worldbuilding and character development skills.â
Like many young readers, Shepherd was obsessed with the characters and stories of her favorite books, but âthere was something a little intimidating about trying to explore further in those stories once the pages had finished.â Video games were different, she said. The player was an active participant, which gave her a sense of ownership over the story that she didnât get with books. âIt felt easier to imagine a continuation of Link and Zelda and the Seven Sagesâ lives after the quests had all been won,â she said. âThe game had invited me to spend so much time pretending to be Link that it felt more natural to let my imagination run with the story.â
âThere is often more you can mess around with as a fanfic writerâ in video games, said SFF writer and editor Hayley Stone, 27. âA lot of the interiority of the characters is unknown or goes unremarked upon. Unless they announce their feelings on-screen, we donât know how they feel about whatâs happening, or about the characters around them. We can make educated guesses, however, and itâs in that space where fanfic lives.â
Despite an impressive list of publication credits that include Fireside Magazine and novels with Random House/Hydra, Stone still regularly writes fanfiction, which she said is a way to unwind and helps her appreciate the elements of storytelling and character that resonate most profoundly with her as a writer.
âMy oldest and most favorite fandoms serve as personal touchstones whenever I begin to feel lost in my own writing,â she said. âI know I can always return to them for that little jolt of happiness and excitement, and then unpack why I feel that way.â
âIf you boil it way down, the central storyline in The Book of M is essentially a quest to find a missing loved one,â said Shepherd, âplus several important side quests that reward the characters with new party members or key items to defeating the great evil, plus plenty of magic.â
Look closely enough, and youâll see JRPG fingerprints all over modern fantasy. In âA Note from the Authorâ at the back of the 2015 book Skyborn, David Dalglish wrote about wanting to âtell a story about a civilization in the skyâ ever since third grade, when he first encountered the land of Zeal in Chrono Trigger.
Similar to Shepherdâs The Book of M, Bryan Campâs debut novel, The City of Lost Fortunes is set in a magical version of our world. The âfirst narrative I created out of my own brain,â said Camp, was âa sequel to Chrono Trigger I wrote when I was supposed to be paying attention in math class.â

Whether it was Chrono Triggerâs floating continents, Xenogearsâ imagery of a crucified Chu Chu, Serge becoming trapped in a Van Gogh-esque painting in Chrono Cross, or Earthboundâs all-around quirkiness, JRPGs in the 16- and 32-bit eras were weird. Super Mario RPG was a series of pratfalls. Secret of Mana let you visit Santaâs cabin in the woods. Final Fantasy Vâs main villain was a tree. Final Fantasy IV culminated with players flying a whale to the moon. Lunar: The Silver Star even took place on the moon.
By ignoring tropes, these games helped create something wholly unique in fantasy. Golden age JRPGs were unshackled by any adherence to ârealism.â They werenât stories trying to recreate political or social realities from human historyâthey were stories about planet-destroying meteors, time travelling witches, and whole cities that could awaken into enormous eidolons.
âSo much â90s fantasy mirrored the tone of the time: dark, gritty, violent, and complicated,â said Troy L. Wiggins. âThe best JRPG stories were about more or less positive things.â
âThe later Final Fantasies managed to strike what I found was an incredible balance between taking themselves extremely seriously and taking themselves not seriously at all,â said Tamsyn Muir. âI love the juxtaposition of these huge, epic stories sitting with absolute comfort next to frog-eating minigames and that time in Final Fantasy VII where you have to find Cloud Strife the best wig.â
Final Fantasy âlanded on hundreds of thousands of people roughly my age with the full force of delightful novelty,â said Scott Lynch. âThe message of the Final Fantasy aesthetic was that you could unchain yourself, be more glib and flexible with your elements.â
This tendency to steer old ideas in new directionsâto limit their worlds and magic system not by what could be realistically justified in a book, but only by the boundaries of their creatorsâ imaginationsâallowed JRPG creators to show to readers that fantasy could be so much more than pastoral Tolkien rip-offs.
âIf you look at the three JRPGs that were the most formative of my adolescence,â Bryan Camp said, âthereâs not a whole lot that is out of bounds. Time travel, aliens, magic, cybernetics, floating cities, zombies, and apocalyptic threat after apocalyptic threat.â
âIn my books there are magicians who make Ghostbusters references and sorcerers who enchant software,â he said. âIn my current project, there are clockwork automatons and language magic and god-beings who are maybe aliens and a street where itâs eternally night. Put some turn-based combat in there and give the protagonist some spiky hair, and itâd be right at home on the PlayStation.â
Grown-Up Fantasy
Perhaps one of the most important contributions that JRPGs have made to fantasy is how they implemented elements of decolonizationâthe act of uncoupling SFF narratives and world building from the systemic tools of oppression that strip colonized peoples of their history, stories, and identity, while recentering the narrative on those voicesâinto their stories, suggests R. Kiran Gopal, a millennial fantasy writer and former associate editor at PodCastle.
âJRPGs showed me that the Tolkien pastiche didnât have to be Eurocentric,â he said. âThey tend to take a kitchen-sink approach to fantasy as well as prioritizing moods, themes, and atmospheres over granular world building. Those things encouraged me as a young writer to think of epic fantasy as a toolkit or palette to draw from instead of a form to be constricted by.â
JRPGs tended towards indifference toward the historical origins of western fantasy tropes, Gopal said. âIt can be really freeing when youâre a teen fantasy nerd and donât know anything about the War of the Roses. Western epic fantasy tends to come packaged with a sense that historical accuracy is really important, which usually ended up being a specific mythologized version of medieval European history thatâs typically not all that accurate and rarely apolitical. JRPGs showed me there was no price of admission to the genre.â
Today there are many examples of popular decolonized fantasy. Marlon Jamesâ Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a brutal, politically-charged epic fantasy set in an African-inspired world. N.K. Jemisinâs three-time Hugo-winning The Broken Earth trilogy paints one of the genreâs richest and most compelling worlds. Ken Liuâs massive series, The Dandelion Dynasty, is an epic fantasy that takes cues not only from Beowulf and the Aeneid, but also Sima Qianâs Records of the Grand Historian and Chinese wuxia novels.
âOne of the things I loved about Final Fantasy X is how unabashedly it threw away the standard medieval European fantasy setting,â said Wiggins. âFinal Fantasy VII got praise for being a cyberpunk story, but I think we owe X some applause for its unique takes on faith, its strange non-European inspired setting filled with brown people and a noticeable brown minority group, and the unique mythology driving its main antagonist.â
Before Final Fantasy X, there were was Junko Kawanoâs Suikoden series. The first two games on PlayStation were revolutionary at their release for many reasons. One was their astronomically large casts, allowing players to recruit up to 108 characters over the course of the game. Another was how they took the typical high fantasy formula and added a complex layer of social and political stakes to the mix.

Suikoden II was âthe first time that I saw an unabashedly political story in a JRPG,â said Wiggins. âIt was fundamentally different because it is more of a sociological story than we typically get in standard JRPGs. It had extremely complex messaging, and I dug that.â
The Suikoden games were JRPGs full of âproxy wars and ascendancy assassinations and genocide,â he said. âOther JRPGs dabbled with these ideas, but in a much less mature way. Suikoden II showed me that it is possible to tell a high fantasy story that shows the smaller, personal ways in which our lives are shattered not just by rogue magical beings, but by the monsters that we createâbe they war, sociopolitical systems, or simple human greed.â
Alongside Kawanoâs games, Yasumi Matsunoâs work on Ogre Battle, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Vagrant Story further illustrated that JRPGs could tell unique, politically complex, and mature stories as compelling and rich as any novel.
So many of the fantasy novels I was reading in the â90s focused on young, naive men coming of age in a large world. Matsunoâs narratives featured capable, grizzled protagonists and characters that did not have to carve out an understanding of the world. Ashley Riot, a powerful Riskbreaker of the Valendia Knights of the Peace, explores the ruins of LeĂĄ Monde with tools and experience at his disposal that would place him among the Aragorns and Lan Mandragorans of the world. Even Ramza Beoulve, the young protagonist from Final Fantasy Tactics, was a member of the aristocracy with all the schooling and military training one would expect of the ruling elite. These were people with histories, or from consequential families of power, and their conflicts spun outward from there, shaping the world around them not by accident or surprise but with intent and purpose.
Final Fantasy Tacticsâ story âhas all the weight and intrigue of a Shakespearean tragedy,â Greg Kasavin, Developer at Supergiant Games and former editor-in-chief of GameSpot once told Kirk Hamilton here on Kotaku.
Matthew Burns, founder of Shadegrown Games, appreciated the gameâs narrative framing device, an imprecise historian recalling past events with murky accuracy. âIt presents the player with a sweeping look at people, politics, and events without itself getting too caught up in any of its own charactersâ emotions and causes.â
Jeremy Parish, podcaster and former EIC of USgamer, cites Matsuno as âperhaps the most idiomatic character to pass through the halls of Square.â Final Fantasy Tactics was not Matsunoâs first game, Parish continued, âbut it was the first to reach a large audience, and it introduced millions of gamers to his personal obsessions: intricate plotting, nuanced characters, and historical verisimilitude.â
How many of those millions of gamers tuned into Game of Thrones, their love for labyrinthine, sometimes incomprehensible epic fantasy storytelling borne by their experience with Final Fantasy Tactics in the late â90s?
More than a few, Iâd bet. In fact, Iâm one of them. Itâs no surprise I discovered the works of Robin Hobb and George R.R. Martin around the same time I was obsessed with Final Fantasy Tactics and Suikoden II. Matsuno and Kawano werenât the first to introduce this style of character and storytellingâlook no further than Final Fantasy VI for a game that featured older, experienced protagonistsâbut they ignited my passion for fantasy narratives that also work as complex sociopolitico epics about humanityâs shifting winds and the perils of progress for the sake of ambition.
Canny Valley
As I revisit the games of the 16- and 32-bit generations today, in my 30s, Iâm struck by how much work the pixel-based and early 3D graphics do to make up for the gamesâ technical limitations. Where todayâs games are expansive and packed with detailâguiding the playerâs perception of the world down to the individual beads of sweat on their avatarâs forehead and blades of grass in mountain fields touched by windâolder games were more of a symbiosis between the gameâs graphics and the playerâs imagination.
âNo shade thrown to the PlayStation, but thereâs something magical about the art that springs from SNES hardware,â said Max Gladstone, 34, the Hugo-nominated author of Empress of Forever. âJust enough power to do cool things, not enough to get lost in your own creative ambition,â he said. âBeauty emerged from those constraints.â

Kazuko Shibuyaâs sprite work in Final Fantasy VI is charming and beautiful, but I didnât know what Locke looked like while playing Final Fantasy VI. Not really. Sure, the art in the gameâs manual gave me an idea, but, as Locke bounded about the television, I had to imagine how the details were playing out. How did his behaviour change when he was infiltrating South Figaro? How did he move and act when he was around Rachel? Whatâs his body language like when heâs with Celes? Shibuya never achieved the same level of fame as Squaresoftâs other masters from the time, but without her work itâs unlikely the Final Fantasy series would have achieved its iconic and lasting look. (Check out this interview with Shibuya on Shmuplations for a great overview of her career.)
Final Fantasy VI was a masterclass in using simple sprites to convey a lot of character, but much of the nuance was left up to the playerâa lot like reading a book.
Even games with larger and more animated sprite work like Trials of Mana or Breath of Fire IV still fell on the impressionist end of the scale. Contrast that to todayâs games, where set pieces are intricately detailed, character models feature an enormous number of polygons and detailed textures, and cut scenes utilize motion capture and camera angles to impart particular emotions on the player. Itâs beautiful and easy to get lost in those worldsâbut itâs different. Fewer of the details are left up to the player, and the experience is closer to an interactive film than reading a book.
Change The World
While thereâs similarities in how these older games and books asked readers and gamers to collaborate on the unified vision for their aesthetic and visual elements, the games took one more step forward by giving the player agency within the narrative, and were not afraid to throw truly unexpected events at the player.
Cronoâs sacrifice, the destruction of the World of Balance, Aerisâ deathâall of these twists were legitimate game changers on par with Frodoâs claiming of the ring, only they happened mid-game, not during the climax. These were huge plot twists that not only surprised the reader, but set the stage for the rest of the narrative. Do you try to resurrect Crono, or take immediate vengeance against Lavos? The entire gameplay structure of Final Fantasy VI changes after Kefka destroys the world, and the player must reassemble their party one character at a time. Or not. Ultimately, itâs not just that the worlds feel truly changed by the game events, but that the player had a hand in executing those changes.
âIn books, everything is laid before you, there is nothing left for you to discover,â said Chris Melissinos, guest curator of The Art of Video Games at The Smithsonian American Art Museum, as reported by Nadia Oxford in USgamerâs âTeaching Creative Thought and Expression Through Video Games.â âVideo games are the only forms of artistic expression that allow the authoritative voice of the author to remain true while allowing the observer to explore and experiment.â
My first attempt to write a novel came in my early 20s. The PlayStation 2 was the hot console for JRPGs, but my heart was still snagged on something a little older. Beyond Eridessys was an original epic fantasy novel following a war between two elvish societies. In reality, though, it was veiled fanfic of Working Designsâ Lunar series. I used to haul my PlayStation and my trusty Commodore 1702 monitor over to my friendâs house and weâd set up side-by-side and play Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete in parallel, trying to keep pace with each other, comparing notes and strategies while trying to avoid spoilers. It was one of the formative experiences of my teenage years, and, no surprise, I gained a strong emotional attachment to the series. You didnât have to look too closely to see the Lunar serial numbers scratched out on Beyond Eridessys: It was secretly set on the moon, was chock full of adventures, and even featured a rapscallion named Dyne.
Beyond Eridessys fizzled out after about 30,000 words, but the mark left by JRPG narratives and my desire to translate that emotional attachment into words and stories never went away.
Looking back, and understanding more about Akitoshi Kawazu and his particular brand of wackiness, I feel pity for that younger version of me, blissfully confused by Final Fantasy Legend IIâs weirdness. When I first laid eyes on it, I had no idea so much of my life would be influenced by its director Kawazu and his contemporaries. I grew up on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a world away from where Sakaguchi, Kawano, and Matsuno worked creating their legendary games, but their influence was global. Life is a circle. In the same way that the earliest JRPGs were influenced by western tabletop and computer-based roleplaying games and literature, those games are now central inspirations for some of the most exciting young SFF authors publishing today.
As a kid, with my love of writing blossoming, video games and fantasy novels provided me with endless opportunities for adventure and escape. I fell into both equally, and, in that way, became the storyteller I am today. Itâs impossible for me to separate the two influences. They represent thousands of threads in the vast tapestry I am unfurling with each new story I tell.
âI donât remember when it started exactly,â says aspiring Dragonmaster Alex at the beginning of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, âbut the dream of having a fantastic adventure in far-off places grabbed my heart early and has yet to let go.â
Unlike Alex, I remember precisely when it started.
Aidan Moher is a Hugo Award-winning editor, the author of âYoungblood,â âThe Dinosaur Graveyard,â and âThe Penelope Qingdom,â and a regular contributor to Tor.com and the Barnes & Noble SF&F Blog. He lives on Vancouver Island with his wife and kids, but you can most easily find him on Twitter (@adribbleofink) or his website.