If only because most U.S. game soundtracks are, in my opinion, bland atmospheric drones punctuated by loud brassy Hollywood-style action movie riffs. Not that J-games don’t do that too, but perhaps a little less often.

This definitely speaks to VGM and film scoring as two different disciplines. I think part of it is that—even in today’s technological landscape—voiced dialogue only makes up a small part of a game’s play time. Thus, you can have an attention-grabbing, aggressive melody line without having to compete with the spoken word for your aural attention. Kirk Hamilton and Leigh Alexander discussed this very point in one of their Final Fantasy VII Letters right here.

Speaking of Kirk Hamilton, I thought his piece you linked earlier regarding Ni no Kuni‘s battle theme blowing it on a discordant set of opening bars was pretty on-point. To me, that’s one of several reasons I highly dislike Chrono Cross‘s regular battle music.

Having to listen to the same battle piece over and over again really does make me wonder why more RPGs don’t have several variants even if they were selected at random; SaGa Frontier 2 was great for this! Your example from Arcadia sounded extremely clever. Although I imagine the ability to create responsive musical design is actually becoming harder over time as the technology steps away from tracked music to streamed recordings.

Oh! There’s an interesting extrapolation one can make about regular battle music being heroic/normative and boss battle music being perilous/disruptive. That usually overlays with the game narrative itself, where it’s quite normal for NPC villagers to accept defeating monsters as a fact of life but it took you, dear hero, to defeat the evil Serpent King at the rear of the Cave of Coprophagia.

I haven’t gotten to P4 yet, but P3 has great battle music too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RKF6gqCXiM (Ugh this just makes me want to play P3P again.) TWEWY has the best soundtrack, in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnt-SEg9J9Y

I’m with you that JRPGs tend to have the best music (I love FFXIII’s soundtrack, too), which made me curious about the battle music in some of my other favorite games since I couldn’t think of other battle themes off the top of my head. The Dragon Age 2 battle music is pretty neat, though not exactly memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvnXjmRLfGM I like the creepy strings.

Guild wars 2 regular battle music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0jyukrqTAo (which reminds me a bit of Asteroid Field from Star Wars) Guild wars 2 boss battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryv7GWYJ490 (the chanting! lol!)

Sometimes that works for me, but more often it doesn’t, and it makes me feel really uncomfortable to hear something that I find so terrible to be done in such an endearing, serious way. That’s a personal issue more than anything else, but it really does give me a strange anxiety of “why is this happeninnggggg?”

Thanks for writing this. I’ve always felt like I have comparatively narrow, or at least different, exposure to video game music compared to most gamers. In particular, because I had Sega consoles in the 8- and 16-bit era and never owned anything by Sony until I bought a PS3 six months ago, series like Final Fantasy have largely passed me by. The upshot is that my knowledge of the video game music canon is still kind of spotty, and when I’ve made up for lost time by listening to soundtracks it’s without the context of the games themselves. So, it’s always great to be exposed to more, and to have that context provided.

Anyway. I think your analysis is spot on! It seems like it’d be really difficult to write a good battle theme — it not only needs to withstand incessant repetition, but it needs to state its theme quickly and directly because the player might only hear 20 seconds of it. (Kirk wrote an interesting piece on why the battle theme in Ni No Kuni failed at this.) By contrast, boss battle music can be a little more subtle because it doesn’t have those restrictions — note how it’s way easier to find something hummable in the first 30 seconds or so of “Blinded by Light” than in “Sabers Edge.”

Other random notes:
- This is personal taste, but I wish there was less rock guitar in JRPG music. Of the examples here, only Persona 4 is doing it for me — the other ones feel kinda cheeseball to me. I remember being turned off by the hott lixx in Xenoblade, too.
- I forgot how goofy the battle music in Super Mario RPG was. It’s neat how it still fits pretty well into your normal/boss music analysis, though!
- “Time to Make History” pretty much sounds like Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.” haaaa

That doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning to be found in the massive spectacles of AAA games. It just means it’s much harder to do it quickly, cleverly, with the kind of head-nodding consensus that Andrew likes to see in his game criticism. Maybe that’s all he’s saying… maybe he’s just saying, “Never trust a review of a AAA title, and don’t bother writing one if you can help it.”

But I sense a lot more going on in his piece. He talks about how they’re exhausting to play, and he implies pretty clearly that BioShock Infinite is dumb despite being minorly addicting, and he says that Spec Ops’ meaning can be reduced to a “starchy residue.” It’s not the writing or the analysis of AAA titles Andrew is criticizing… it’s the actual play experience. If that’s actually the argument he’s making, I strongly disagree! And I think anything worth experiencing is worth reading about, and therefore writing about.

The only angle wherefrom I can agree with Andrew is that maybe we should writing reviews of AAA games. I can get behind this, mainly because I don’t read those reviews.

The gaming market is big enough, I think even when limited to the non-AAA sphere, that I’d say it is wasteful to expect or even desire critics to spend much time engaging with works they find, on the whole, to be frustrating.

That isn’t to say that critics shouldn’t try to engage with works that are challenging, certainly should not exclude games without ad budgets, nor should they be spared all work that lacks polish. I think specialization, if defined in such a way to include thematic or gameplay elements of particular interest to the critic, is a good way to avoid frustration while not relieving the critic of the duty to seek out the new, the difficult, and the lesser known when relevant .

Admittedly, the specialization approach means that some areas of game criticism could be left underserved. However, while critics do have a salutary incentive to go into underserved spaces, I think that approach has its limits. If such an area is outside of the critic’s specialization, they may do well to find and promote those doing good writing in obscurity already in that area.

Thus, I think it is totally valid to choose a specialization that excludes AAA or that excludes shooting people in the face or any number of choices that would focus one on the non-AAA market. I think you make a great point Todd that writing about the entirety of a AAA can be critical malpractice. The specialization model might also suggest that those critics that do look at AAA titles should zero in on the parts of most interest to them and skip over the rest, openly and without apology. That said, I do think Andrew Vanden Bosch is wrong, there are many things well worth writing about for some critics that are happening in the AAA sphere. Moreover, I think that focused criticism of popular titles is probably one of the easier entry points to criticism as a google search on some aspect of Bioshock: Infinite leads to writer who can then introduce many new things to the reader. At the margin, there are probably too many writers spending too much time on the AAA sphere, but I think for most that’s an argument for pulling back, not abandonment.

That is, the number of hours of games that comes out in a given year is well beyond the capacity of even dedicated critics to manage. For the time being, that may not be true in just the indie sphere. However, a large part of the Twine and related movements are about lowering the barriers of entry to allow more voices. If that movement succeeds on its own terms, than it will be flooded with playable hours as well, albeit in smaller packages.

Maybe the days of games that all gamers must play are just past and specialization is a path of the future.