Like many people, I fell obnoxiously in love with Undertale shortly after its release. It’s an indie video game, very retro, and strongly influenced by the Mother series. It also has a number of revolutionary concepts in its design and execution that don’t need to be described here. One important aspect of the game is its Brechtian ability to communicate simultaneously with the main character and the actual person playing the game.
This is particularly relevant during the final boss fight of the “Genocide” or “No Mercy” version of the game. I was emotionally unable to play this particular version, so I checked out a YouTube video of the last fight, which features the song Megalovania.
Megalovania is a fast-paced, very rock-ish song. It plays while you are fighting someone who is extraordinarily frustrated, infuriated beyond a level most people could understand. This boss is incandescently angry, not only at you, but at himself, and is fighting with an incredible combination of searing hatred and arctic despair. This song (composed by the game’s designer, Toby Fox) did a beautiful job of highlighting and expressing this boss’ emotional state. I thought it was just one more example of the game’s genius and a testimony to the benefits of having a game designer compose his own music for said game.
It turns out, though, that Megalovania was not written for this character. Though composed by Fox, this song was in fact written years before Undertale came out, and was used for final boss fights in two of Fox’s previous games. Fox had even written a different song for this final fight, but evidently discarded it in favor of his old standby, Megalovania.
So this raises the question: Did Fox feel this song was an accurate expression of the Final Boss’ psyche, and so chose to reuse it? Did he just think it sounded cooler than his other composition? And along those same lines: Is there any real link to be found between this character and this song, or did I superimpose this interpretation?
This sorta throws a pall over art as a whole, for me. I have derided film acting for years now, always mentioning Eisenstein’s early work on montaging/cutting: how Eisenstein’s early experiments show that acting is virtually irrelevant and sometimes antithetical to film work. But film has always been a combination of celebrity worship and flimsy spectacle, so this revelation meant little to me.
My naive assumption about Megalovania, however, seems to cast a similarly disillusioning light on not only video games, but music itself. Can music really capture any specific moment, or can it all be interpreted so broadly as to mean “scary,” “badass,” and “existential emotional torment,” both simultaneously and separately? If so, how can we really say that music (or indeed any art) accomplishes anything beyond technical excellence? This kinda seems to damn all modern concepts of art, reducing it to the mere aesthetics that have defined its value for most of civilized history.
Or maybe I’m overreacting. I dunno.