Immersion has long been a central concern for writers on game music, though the concept itself can be slippery to define. 4 Though these commentators all highlight different elements within Ni no Kuni’s battle theme, their concerns all circle around a central idea: a perceived mismatch of the music and its context, and consequently a failure to immerse the player in combat. (In the Q&A afterward, one distinguished colleague offered that “sucky valley” might have been a more appropriate label, leading to some hilarity.) At another conference a few years later, Matthew Thompson suggested that the battle cue was simply much too slow, that it would have been perfectly fine if it were faster. Gibbons suggested that the theme didn’t effectively accompany the in-game action because it fell into a kind of “uncanny valley” between Western classical composition and traditional, loop-based game scoring. This paradoxical relationship between compositional craft and in-game effectiveness has piqued the interest of several ludomusicologists, as it involves stakes well beyond the critical fortunes of a single game. Battle themes therefore make little sense as analytical objects out of context: by definition, they signal a break that impedes the player’s movement throughout a larger environment.įor Hamilton, Hisaishi wrote the battle theme of Ni no Kuni against the conventions of JRPG battle music, marring the player experience even as the piece stood out for its musical merits. Because the repetitive grind of JRPG battles interrupts movement through the overworld, battle themes should be understood as ruptures in the sonic environment, just as the battle stage is a spatial rupture in the overworld. This last phenomenon creates a sense of “musicospatial stasis”-that is, a musically induced sense of stasis that intermingles with and projects itself onto the visual and narrative fields. This article examines how the grind of JRPG fighting manifests as an integral part of battle music composition, analyzing three standard conventions in detail: (1) a clear opening audiovisual rupture, (2) a fanfare as cadence, and (3) a sustained period of harmonic stasis underpinning busy surface textures. This point leads directly to a number of pressing questions: How do battle themes function? How do these functions relate to the all-important concerns of immersion and interactivity? How do we evaluate the effectiveness of battle music? And finally, what would a preliminary theory of battle music composition look like? This paper argues that battle music is first and foremost a variety of functional music, a genre that fans measure not by its sonic beauty but by its psychological effectiveness.
This is particularly true of games that require the player to “grind”-that is, to engage in repetitive fights in order to level-up characters and thereby gain tactical advantages later.
Battles in Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) present special problems for game immersion because of their sheer ubiquity and repetitiveness.
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