I agree, there’s no great answer here! Fade-outs suck and aren’t fun to play. You hit a great song length for RB in that it’s identical to lots of pop music, but I wonder if the audience for these tracks cares much about that?
The Black Mages do their own noodling on top of the song, but they do come back to it before the end:
Like I said, there’s no great answer and I’m not going to pretend like I have The Answer, but all the VGM I’ve listened to over the years loops once then fades out. It’s still very much an open question if that’s how the music should be handled in RB.
