Changing Times: The Diatonic Rhythms of Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy Battle Music

The Final Fantasy series’ battle themes are some of the most beloved tracks from their respective games, and not simply out of the player’s sheer exposure to them over the course of a game. Battle themes are designed to be thrilling accompaniments to tense gameplay, and one of the key musical parameters with which many of them generate this tension is rhythm. This chapter explores the rhythmic construction of Uematsu’s Final Fantasy battle themes through the lens of diatonic rhythm, and finds a gap between the music and theory that allows each to inform the other. Ultimately, this chapter carves out a new category – propulsive rhythm – that partially overlaps with diatonic rhythm while also serving to explain how rhythm functions in Uematsu’s battle music.