Game That Tune

Blue Dragon

The Neverending Hook

Nobuo Uematsu’s best-worst boss theme from Blue Dragon is a rite of passage.

By Matt Kodner • November 8, 2012

Game music has the power to earworm its way into your heart long after you put the controller down. Each week in Game That Tune, we highlight a great tune from a great game (or a great tune from a just-okay game).

Song: “Eternity”
Composers: Nobuo Uematsu, Hironobu Sakaguchi
Game: Blue Dragon (2007)

Blue Dragon follows a ragtag gang of miscreants who save the world by killing giant monsters with their magical shadows. The game exudes genre trappings at almost every corner. There are appropriately grandiose orchestral backings for the open-world segments, and when it’s time to fight, you get the typical frenzied, synth-driven battle music. However, the usual rhythms are disrupted by composer Nobuo Uematsu’s “Eternity,” which plays during each boss battle.

“Eternity” is a very weird boss theme, structured as sort of a neverending hook. Because it plays during every big showdown, it’s easy to grow accustomed to its assault, in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. The lyrics—written by Dragon’s scribe himself, Hironobu Sakaguchi—are incomprehensibly shrieked by the song’s vocalist. It sounds like a South Park rendition of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan. But in fact it actually is Gillan wailing lines like, “This is the beginning, here’s where it all gets started! WAHHHHHYEAHH!!” against increasingly manic organ and guitar solos. The song seems absurd at first—almost likable—but quickly becomes irritating, until it becomes hilarious again. I experience these stages of song-listening grief ever time I hear the piece, and that mental bargaining has likely cemented “Eternity” in the scarred psyches of Blue Dragon players for, dare I say it, eternity.

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