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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