ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of that commingling, using Final Fantasy IV as a model to show not just how music mediates time, but also how that mediation helps us more generally conceptualize player engagement in the ludonarrative fictions of video games. Having established that the affective differences already mark the tunes as distinct, the interruption of the battle sequence coordinates with a large-scale musical change, which further distinguishes them through the processes of narrative temporality. Such evidence of its early position in the trajectory of video game technology—it was released in 1991 as a relatively early title for the Super Famicom and Super Nintendo Entertainment System—is paralleled in the sound quality of the music. The cave environment featuring “Into the Darkness” indeed appears to be gloomy and somewhat winding, qualities we might also broadly locate in narrative music as we see it on the page.
