VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 7: Fin

Fin is the first love interest you meet in Steam Prison, and it's pretty clear from the get-go take he's nursing an unrequited crush on Cyrus that their society will not allow him to act on, but he was only added as a romantic option in later releases of the game. At first I thought it was because Cyrus gets exiled from the Heights at the start of the game so you simply don't get to see him again, but then he shows up later on most routes as a part of HOUNDS, so he's not entirely removed from the story. That said I can see why he might not have been a love interest the first time around, as he's pretty damn damaged in the base game.

His role on most routes other than his own is primarily an antagonistic one. After being transferred to the HOUNDS, Sachsen basically makes a personal torture project out of him to turn him into a killer. This mentally breaks Fin, and the only thing that keeps him going is the hope of meeting Cyrus again. He knows that as a criminal she should be somewhere within the sanctuary district he now patrols, but he's not mentally stable anymore so his feelings for her become twisted and possessive, making him an obstacle to avoid on multiple routes. That Cyrus might enter a relationship with another man (when he's been suffering all this time in hopes of seeing her again) is no longer acceptable.

My initial impression of him, prior to playing the game, was that he was sweet and if he wasn't route locked he would have been my first choice to play. Then he started killing people just for inconveniencing his potential reunion with Cyrus and, well, I wasn't thrilled. I don't like yandere characters (sweet on the outside, crazy on the inside). It bothers me that in a lot of scenes where Cyrus is confronted with how messed up he is, if she comes out of it okay all is forgiven no matter what he did. She even runs back to save his life in one ending after he bashed her over the head to knock her out and kidnap her.

And there are, of course, multiple endings where she does not come out of it okay. Particularly on Eltcreed's route, bad ends with Fin result in him imprisoning her with implied rape to convince her to return his affection.

But this may be one yandere I tolerate better than others, and the reason is that his obsession and potential to do damage is not hidden prior to playing his romance. Even if you skip all the bad ends, you'll at minimum see him killing fellow HOUNDS, attacking Eltcreed with a sword, dismembering a corpse, and punching Adage. Admittedly, it also helps that it's not his default state, but knowing what he's capable of in the name of devotion helps his actual route work.

Also, despite my dislike for yanderes, the more brutal, callous Fin still does a number of good things; from returning Cyrus's long lost pendant, which she trades away for medicine in the common route, to killing Glissade and Sachsen in Yune's good ending.

Fin's route splinters off early, before Cyrus can even be condemned, so he's not tortured into being a crazy person. Instead, when the police come to arrest her for the murder of her parents, Fin (falsely) confesses to the murder hoping to spare her. He even provides a believable motivation, that he's in love with her and wanted to take her away before she could get married.

Of course Cyrus doesn't want him to take the rap for a murder neither of them did, but Fin is pretty smart with his false confession. Because he admitted to another crime (unsanctioned love) there's no point to Cyrus trying to take the blame in his place. She can't save him.

Though Fin oddly gets a trial when she didn't, it still works out in Warner's favor as far as his agreement with Glissade. He knows Cyrus will be sent to work with the HOUNDS which will put her in reach of Glissade so there's no reason for him to fight whether it's Cyrus or Fin who gets pinned with the murder charge. HOUNDS members die for unsavory and certainly unethical reasons all the time.

This leads to a role reversal from most other routes. This time Fin is a prisoner and Cyrus becomes a member of HOUNDS, which quite frankly, was a concept I loved. But after playing the route, I had a lot of thoughts.

Foremost is who this route was written for. Fin was added later, which likely means he was added based on fan feedback. Some players like yanderes, but this route takes place before he's driven crazy. While he still shows signs of his potential to obsess over Cyrus, he never gets to the point where he imposes on her personal freedoms. He's even willing to step out of her life entirely (for his personal sanity and to avoid complicating her job with the HOUNDS). So his route doesn't seem satisfactory for those who loved the yandere side of him.

But he's still a darker and more romantically aggressive character (at least until Cyrus tells him to stop, which he respects) than his initial personality in the Heights suggests, so he doesn't quite feel right for those who liked him as he was at the start.

Also, he just seems to be written inconsistently. Early in the common route he's established as a guy who can be paralyzed by fear when he sees Cyrus and Sachsen duelling in a way that could get her killed. Yet he rescues her when they meet again in the Depths by stabbing one of her assailants with a knife, grabbing his sword, and laying into the others. This is shades of yandere Fin, not his pre-yandere self.

When they have a chance to talk in private about his attraction to her, he offers to teach her about love, starting with kissing and moving towards undressing her, but later on, when she suggests they share a bed (because it's big enough and the room only comes with one) he's suddenly not sure he's ready for that even though it's pretty obvious from context that she expects they will both be clothed.

Aside from that, his route doesn't really have a story. It's shorter than most other routes and follows the pair as they're exiled from the Heights and eventually escape from the sanctuary district (since Sachsen is making life miserable for them) to the Depths where Cyrus accepts work as Eltcreed's bodyguard and Fin opens a repair shop. There is no climax. There's no resolution to anything other than Cyrus and Fin's relationship. It felt like the writer just didn't know where to go with things and decided that now that they're away from Sachsen it was time to call it a day.

I suppose you could argue that Cyrus challenging Sachsen was the climax given what's at stake (certainly that's when a bad end branches off), but she ends up running away when Ulrik intervenes. I was looking forward to her kicking his ass! I thought it would have been great if she put him in his place as on Ines's route and brought about change to the sanctuary district.

And the worst part is that I feel there was so much missed potential. Cyrus being part of the HOUNDS and hoping to go back to the Heights through hard work to correct an injustice is a fantastic parallel to Ines's story, but unlike him, she has an incredibly hard time overlooking cruelty, even when her boss expects it of her (and both Fin and Ines encourage her to do so as well, since Sachsen's rule is law).

We see a litany of things that Sachsen does wrong, but oddly he's the only member of HOUNDS who is blatantly doing bad things in front of Cyrus, whereas in the common route just about any HOUND who isn't Ines is a morally compromised individual. Does she go on a tear with her coworkers too?

I would have liked to have seen more of her daily life in HOUNDS, especially since she expresses solidarity with her comrades. The HOUNDS aren't well liked and are in danger of being overpowered by the vastly more numerous criminals if they aren't careful, so she completely understands that they have to have each other's backs even if she disagrees with Sachsen's methods. She views them as fellow police officers like they used to be, and even though she's the only woman in HOUNDS and a lot of them go out whoring, she doesn't experience any discrimination for her gender. None of them hit on her.

We could have had an inside take to see more of their side of the story, because even though they're the jailors, they're not there any more voluntarily than their prisoners, but we really don't get that.

If Fin's route was overstuffed I could see leaving that out. But his route is pretty bare bones as it is. The confrontation with Sachsen in the market feels like it should have been an escalation point, focusing on the route's central problem, the one that would have to be dealt with in the climax, instead of the high point in the story's tension.

And as with the two bodyguard routes, I'm disappointed that Cyrus doesn't get to avenge her parents, especially since finding the real culprit and clearing Fin's name is her driving motivation at the start of his route. She has every intention of serving as best she can in HOUNDS to get transferred back to the Heights. But it all gets thrown out the window.

If she consciously made that sacrifice when she confronted Sachsen, it would be understandable, but throwing that away and running from the fight because some stranger called out to her was weird.

I get that Cyrus and Fin can't have a happy ending in the Heights. None of the good endings end there, because they can't, but she doesn't even get any minor wins. None of the murder culprits are found out. Sachsen is still in command of the sanctuary district. Even if the bodyguard routes had nothing to do with her personal story, there were still people to foil.

Fin's route has none of that, so it relies entirely on romantic moments between Cyrus and Fin. Does it work?

If you like his character (either pre-yandere or both pre- and post-), then probably. I think his route is short and needed a plot, but it gets a surprising amount of mileage from the fact he's not new to the player.

Cyrus is shocked at the beginning of his route that he would take the blame for her, and if this was the player's first route, it would probably be a bit much as well. But because Fin can only be played last, the depths of his devotion to Cyrus are known. We know he will do anything to protect her. If being exiled in her place is the way, then so be it. (On any other route where she's sent to the sanctuary district, he comes charging in to stop her exile, and it's only because she tells him to drop it that nothing drastic happens.)

Aside from his initial forwardness in the Depths (see the written inconsistently part), Fin's romance is pretty much what I wanted. He loves Cyrus and when she admits she's willing to learn about love now that they're no longer in the Heights, he lets her move at her own pace to decide whether or not she feels the same.

His route is also the only one where we learn what motivates Fin and why he fell in love with Cyrus in the first place. Though she asks him on the common route why he became a police officer, their elevator ride ends before he can answer, and it's only in one of his bad ends that we get a flashback to what things were like for Fin in the Heights.

It turns out Fin suffers from self-esteem issues. He wasn't good at the family business, which he should have been the heir to being the eldest son, and he hated disappointing his father. So he decided to try to find some other work where he'd be useful to someone and became a police officer. But he wasn't very good at the entrance exam so it took him three tries.

Fin tends to view himself as lacking or useless, but Cyrus thinks the world of him. Even though he feels he can't keep up with her, she insists that they're a team and that he's a huge help to her. No one else had ever been so supportive of him before that poor Fin fell for her hard.

I also really liked his epilogue story. It requires knowing a little Japanese since the English translation doesn't quite convey what's going on, but Fin always speaks to Cyrus in keigo (formal Japanese), even though they're in a relationship, and he has no problem speaking informally to other people. (Though she doesn't get it, this is because Fin respects her so much, he can't help, but be formal.) Since she already speaks to him informally, she'd like him to be informal too, so they decide to play a game and switch speaking styles, where she'll be formal and he'll be informal.

The English translation goes pretty over the top for Cyrus's formal, more than Fin's casual, but the end result is that Cyrus is the first to screw up because she finds casual Fin's speaking style so damn sexy she forgets to be formal. Since he likes this effect on her, he decides to keep it for at least a little longer.