Quote:
Originally Posted by Jormungand
I admire your bravery in choosing to explore and write about game music academically, but I think you'd be much more successful if your narrowed down your area of research as much as possible. 5th/6th gen JRPG town music may seem pretty specific, but when you look at it from a musicological perspective, the music you will be examining will still be exceptionally wide in its variety.
The topic, as it stands now, is not actually conducive to the use of specific examples from specific games--in my opinion, anyway. You can't list them all and therefore the act of listing only some will invariably result in the exclusion of others. How do you decide which games to mention? What makes those examples representative of RPG town themes from the era in question?
At the very least, you do have the advantage of game music's relative infancy (if not outright nonexistence) as a serious academic branch of musicology. As a pioneer, you have the right to construct your argument any way you see fit.
If you maintain the topic for your paper, you'll definitely have to illustrate the role of music in JRPGs. There is no real precedent for this, so you could literally say whatever you want. I guess what I would do is briefly discuss roles of specific music relative to plot advancement. You could draw a clear dichotomy between music played during scenes where the plot progresses (cutscene music, or whatever you want to call it) and music that plays when the plot progression is static (battle themes, town themes, etc.) Naturally, there's that gray zone where plot progression could happen anytime, anywhere in a JRPG--but chances are your professors don't know that, and it wouldn't really serve this topic to agonize over the details anyway.
Once you establish your theory about what town music is supposed to do in a JRPG, your task will be to convince the reader that you're right. Is it a break from the action, a bridge between one segment of plot and the next? Should it calm the player? Is it more melodic than other selections from the score? If it is, is there a reason for it?
Or, is the music very candidly tied to the plot, where a town near the beginning of the game has innocent, light-hearted music but a town further along in the story is in the middle of a war and instead carries heavier, burdensome emotions?
You can see how easy it is to ask questions, which is why I thought it might help to narrow your topic down even further.
My other concern is your criteria related to the console generations. Your topic might suggest that JRPG town music from this specific era functions in a fundamentally different way than JRPG town music from an earlier or later period. I know that's not what you meant--I know you're just using the criteria as a means of narrowing your subject. However, on the surface, and probably to anyone reading, music of the 5th/6th generation JRPG must be somehow different than other generations.
If you're still adamant about soldiering on, I'll list a few RPGs that just have generally great town music: Breath of Fire III & IV, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shadow Hearts 1 & 2, Suikoden 1 & 2, SaGa Frontier II, Vandal Hearts. (And I'm sure you're well-versed on Mitsuda so I won't even bother mentioning any of his other work.) Those games pretty much throw a wrench into the commonly accepted vision of what "JRPG town music" is supposed to sound like. But now that I think about it, that might actually be a reason to avoid discussing them in your paper...
|
Well now, this was an informative point. I understand your worry about the subject being broad and I share your concern. This is still in planning stages and I'll have plenty of time to discuss this with my professors and you guys so don't worry. Did you have an idea on how to broaden the inclusion of consoles and at the same limit the games talked about in great detail?
My thought with 5th/6th generation was that after the SNES-era the limitations put on music were severely eased up. Streaming audio, original samples became the standard rather than something odd and obscure. To me this is reason to think the composer had more tools available to make functional music. The issue is that this is true for the 7th generation too which is why I for a long time thought about including this. A
REASON for limiting the scope to just ONE generation or ONE console could be that this particular console was either the one with the most successful JRPGs or the one with the MOST JRPGs. Any more thoughts on the limitation of platforms/generations/games are much appreciated.
Also all questions you ask about the music's function are things I was planning to cover, this is numerous months of work after all. All the questions you brought up are legitimate and if I DON'T tackle them it isn't very good research, is it?
I guess it'd be easier with a more limited scope, like you said, but I don't see this as a big roadblock. Once again I have a bit of a hard time explaining all this properly in English but hopefully you see where I'm coming from.
What to exclude will be something I'll have to think over and, above all, back up but that's always part of research that's not all-inclusive. Again, any ideas YOU have about how to narrow it down would be welcome but it seems like you're suggesting changing the topic altogether