It's day 15 in our take on the 30-day VGM challenge! Today's a cool category: "Boss Battle Music". We chose @tobyfox's "Death by Glamour", from Undertale (2015): youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kDr4na…

It's the music of a fight against a boss called Mettaton EX, perhaps one of the most glamorous characters in videogames.

Obvious references are disco and funk music, but channeled into VGM format, the kind of explosive, hectic, hi-stakes dramatic music you get in JRPGs. Think of Final Fantasy boss fights, but also stuff like Chrono Cross.

What makes "Death by Glamour" stand out is precisely its dance music base. Where most boss fight music depends on big orchestral ideas and their electronic equivalent, this track really goes hard into fast disco music.

Its dramatism is not the Romance of the hero overcoming, as is the case in most RPG music of this type, but more akin to the pop excitement of a dance competition, of stars shining at the center of the club. Win or lose - it's all joyful.

"Death by Glamour" is special as boss music because it suggests the battle is a an adversarial game: the boss is not an enemy to destroy, they are an adversary to defeat - no hard feelings. This slight but incredibly substantial difference underlines the entirety of Undertale.

As such, Undertale questions the Romance of RPGs and the status of the hero as victor and vanquisher; perhaps it's better to do away with heroism and defeat bosses in dance-offs rather than destroy them for some unquestioned, virtuous and almost always authoritarian cause.

As a corrective to the initial tweet in this thread, I'm linking to the @MateriaColl release on @Bandcamp, which you can find here: tobyfox.bandcamp.com/album/u…