Narrating Near-Death Experience

Abstract

Rarely do the worlds of classical music and video games collide explicitly; when they do, as in the 2007 JRPG Eternal Sonata, the result is of marked semiotic interest. The game’s complex metafictional plotline – involving multiple levels of narrative seeking to blend fantasy and reality – invites speculation and interpretation, particularly concerning its multivalent ending. This article uses recently developed analytical methods from the burgeoning field of musical semiotics to glean poignant interpretative meaning from the video game’s musical surface. By invoking music-theoretic work in intertextuality (Klein 2004), musical narrative (Almén 2008), and virtual agency (Hatten forthcoming), I argue that the video game’s musical score is a hermeneutic key for decoding artistic meaning in Eternal Sonata. Thus, ludomusicology contributes vitally to the semiosis of a video game’s meaning as a holistic, multimedia entity.