Title: Deja Vu no Jutsu
Author: Vixen Tail
Rating: M
Genre: None given
Status: Complete
Fandom: Naruto
Pairings: Minato/Kushina, OC/Shikaku
Summary: Take one dead, thirty year old career soldier, stick in the body of a child during the Second Great Shinobi War. Add a mini-Namikaze Minato, ninjas, chakra, tailed beasts, and shake well. Is it any wonder she thought she was insane? Second/Third Great Ninja War era SI AU.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9255749/1/Déjà-vu-no-Jutsu

This is a very good story about a US Marine who was reincarnated into a very bloody Naruto-verse and promptly began doubting her own sanity. She befriended many of the Yondaime's generation, including the original Ino-Shika-Chou.

I like it because it does a very good job of portraying the insanity of the SI, the bloodiness and loneliness of the ANBU, and how ninja are actually paranoid, perceptive people. For instance, so many ANBU are found out by their comrades trying to make sure that the ANBU is not a traitor or spy that no one really gets angry.

5/5.

 

Very solid SI story. I would rate it above Vapors (mostly because of the turns the story took in its sequel) but below Dreaming of Sunshine. It is quite lengthy however, and the author hadn't quite hit their stride at the start, as it does tend to meander a bit. Once it gets going, however, the going is good.

 

for myself, i consider it slightly above average than the typical OC!SI entry but two things kept me from getting past the first 3 (rather lengthy) chapters.

1) the time skips all over the place.
while i'm not particularly a fan of entire arcs happening where nothing happens but minor character building and slice of life, things felt like they were jumping around a bit too much for me. one paragraph the si is just finishing up a day in the life of an academy student, the next she's suddenly been scouted and been in anbu for several months. it's not being in anbu i dislike (rather, i enjoy the parallels between anbu and special forces and their own ranking system within), but the fact that ... well, she just jumps in and we're hearing about it after the fact with a token 'oh we were scouting her during her academy days.'

2) descriptors. oh my god the descriptors.
this is what finally killed it for me. i might have been able to give the time jumps because hey, we're moving along the plot. fine.
but at a certain point i told myself that if i had to read another mention of 'the woman in a girl's body' or 'the girl with the multicoloured eyes' or some variation on that theme i would drop it like a rock.

very next sentence i got 'the former anbu with the multicoloured eyes'.

dropped.

3/5, it shows promise. given how much i see it on review forums i'm sure it does well once the author hits their stride. i just can't bring myself to get to that point.

 

The author even writes "the dual-eyed girl" in chapter one. Should I conclude that everyone else has three eyes? No one else's eyes and colours within are described despite the presence of Uchiha and Hyuuga characters.

This is an annoying feature. I hope it gets toned down later. Having heterochromia and unique purple chakra just smacks of character wank. Oh, look at me, I'm speshul. She reminds me of TVTropes ridiculous mascot: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TropeTan

And the harping on about "therapy" annoys me to no end as well. I don't mind that the protagonist is mentally fucked up, if that's what the author wants, but I just hate that a Japanese ninja village has Western psychological therapy as a thing and that the kids and ninja are so dependent on it like it's the one and only correct solution for ninja mental health woes. That is goddamn boring. Be fucked up! Work through your mental health problems some other way. Anything other than this, please. A ninja village wants weapons, not Care Bears.

Why would ANBU or any ninja care about a child's pranking skills, or encourage them to deliberately fail school as part of a weird acceptance test? They can learn enough trap making from a real ninja in a week, to render years of childhood pranking practice utterly irrelevant. You don't write people off a career path based on ridiculous criteria at age eleven. If the criteria was character/personality based, I'd understand it, but it's as much luck as anything else.

The SI and the world building annoy me right now. I'm on chapter two.

 

I tried to read it once before, got relatively far, I think, but then I just stopped reading for some reason and I honestly can't remember when, where and why. Tried it again a couple of days ago and I can't really get into it.

I hate it when the SI says that they are an SI or have memories. The only fic that pulled that kinda off is Catch Your Breath by Long Noi and even there, it's described as visions and not "I have memories of a different life". And it was build up, made integral to the story.

Here, she just dumps that on her school friends/acquaintances and I'm not sure how to feel about that.

I really have no memory on the rest of the story, could someone give me a rough summary on what happens later?

 

So I only got to chapter 13 before I couldn't do it anymore. If the second half is way better, please tell me, but I'm going to assume it's just more of the same.

The term Mary Sue gets thrown around a lot these days, and very rarely does it represent its old, pre-internet meaning. Natsumi is one of those old Mary Sues, an author self-insert who gets along with every character that matters, who fixes nearly every "wrong" she sees, and whose flaws are either not really flaws or so slight as to barely matter.

I have other issues with it, like the worldbuilding and writing, but those have already been commented on. I can't rate this higher than a 2/5. Maybe some people would throw it into Almost Recommended, but it was a slog at the start for me and it never got better.

 

Sounds like she's the Wesley Crusher of the Narutoverse.

 

How far in?

 

I skimmed until Chapter 3 and I think I read it in full from Chapter 4.

 

I liked this better than Dreaming of Sunshine.

 

Tasoli, could you maybe elaborate? Kinda want to know what's so good about this and the pro side in this thread has been a bit sparse.

 

I disagree that it is superior to DoS. It lacks the structure, characterisation and world building that Silver Queen does well with.

 

Nemrut

I think a lot of people that doesn't like this is because at the start of the story MC is a bit of a wreck due being dead. She does have psylogical problems with long term consquances. Also MC does severeal mistakes with long term effects. So people might be put off by that. I on the other hand liked because reincarnation isn't brushed off. It actually gives secondary characters like Shikaku and Inochi a reason to stay involved in the story.

Unlike other stories where reincarnation is treated like a game where nobody but MC changes here everything she does have ripple effects. Like she makes friends with both Hyuga twins and Uchiha Fugaku and introduces them. They work together in an event even when she is not around because they know eachother now. Which ripples out to other things etc.

Main character does a lot of things during the story and some people might be put off by how much she accomplishes but unlike other stories this one actually has time progressing. MC does a lot of things but it is spread out to a long time. And the time progression does make sense. No sudden jumps except perhaps later parts of the story.

MC is pretty strong shinobi and an ANBU but she remarks that She hit her limit by mid story while Minato was still going strong. So the calls for MC being a Mary Sue is not true.

She does use her otherworldly knowladge even her knowladge of Naruto's story but by the end of the story she doesn't remember all. For example she gifted her friends with cribs with seals on them that doesn't allow anybody but parents and people that is keyed to it can take children out and she doesn't remember why she felt the need to do that.

All in all I am generally bored by SI because everything they change is either direct result or completly unseen chain ending with something that logically doesn't follow with the effect. Here it is ripple that goes outward that you can see with clear effect-counteeffect-result.

There is only one arc that I felt was unnecessery later on the story about MC's biological clan but I forgive that one.

So all in all this is better SI because things taken seriously tough the story.

In comparition DoS start's with "I am at Naruto Universe, Oh shit"

Edit: Also This story does have some interesthing world building too. Like Academy during wartime has interesting method of determining what kind of ninja you will be. Or how does Sealing works etc.

 

She comes off as Sue-ish due to her social connections/position, not her strength - that's what Callagan meant with "old" Mary Sue.

And I get where that's coming from, since I definitely remember rolling my eyes at a couple places. It's been a while since I read though and I didn't finish (don't quite remember why I lost interest), so I should probably give it another try before rating.

I understand wanting the reincarnation treated with more gravity, but I didn't find the execution itself worth writing home about.

 

Well, she does become very important pretty quickly. One might call it Sue-ish, but then again, considering that she made friends with the clan heirs and Minato that's pretty much expected. At least the author wrote the story in such a way that she's not OP in the fighting department.

I read the story through in one go and enjoyed it. The story isn't really "special" but there are some ideas that are interesting and there is a feeling that the author tried to not retread the familiar paths, which, in a verse like Naruto, isn't that easy. I never felt that much tension from external threats or that the characters would die, but it was still a pleasant read.

I, personally, never finished DoS. I don't know why. I read a lot of chapters and then lost interest.

 

On one hand she doesn't have any friends that Minato isn't with friends with on the other hand he was the Gary Stue of the canon in the first place. So meh on the account on her being Mary Sue.

 

I hated that. It's an illogical, wasteful, and irrelevant method of sorting trainee ninjas into their correct career path.

The world building is ill-thought-out. Bear in mind that I haven't made it past chapter two yet. I've been reading Nemrut's recommendation of Catch Your Breath, by Lang Noi, instead.

 

Catch Your Breath is kind of pissing me off with how much it pretends to deviate from Canon to then suddenly get dragged back down. Maybe it gets better as it goes, but I just passed the first major event and the whole story feels pointless.

 

Drake

This isn't a CYB review thread. If your post doesn't relate to Deja Vu no Jutsu, then it doesn't belong here.