Discussion topic for Track 1 of Owari no Hoshi no Love Song: Owari no Sekai Kara (From the Closed World). Please support the official release by purchasing the album from iTunes! You can find a translation of the lyrics on ShiraneHito’s blog.
Please tag references to later songs or outside works with the [spoiler] tag, providing adequate context in parenthesis.
0 voters
I think the lyrics are the things that I love the most from this song. Starting off with
“Being able to laugh with each other is such a great happiness”
“That is what you have taught me”
And then ending with
“Will I ever be able to laugh again in this world?”
“Leaving the photograph with you in it, I began to walk forward”
Those lyrics themselves, made me fall in love with the song. One of the best things Jun Maeda has written in his music.
The thing I love most, is the symbolism that comes with it. There are many things that can be interpreted with this song, and many meanings that can be made.
One symbolism I can find in this song would be that everything you do, will affect someone, even yourself.
In a way, I think this song symbolizes for people to be able to smile on their own will, and not because of someone else in their lives. Although smiling from someone else in their life is good, being able to smile with your own happiness is stronger.
It can also symbolize the idea of moving on, realizing that people in the past might not stay with you forever, so in the end, all you can do is remind yourself of those days of happiness and love, and move on, even if those people are not by your side.
It also showcases to not take love so easily, because love can be the cause for terrible things that can happen to an individual. This was showcased with the girl.
But I also love the idea of the girl going back in time, showcasing how much this girl had loved the boy. Realizing that he had been crying over the disappearance of the friend that could have possibly been his closest friend. Realizing that she had taken someone else’s future away, which was her own in both timelines.
And in the end, she never received love, nor was she able to go back into her time. In the end, she was walking in the world of nothing but dust, and darkness, atoning for her selfish wishes.
This is probably one of the most depressing stories I’ve ever heard of. Wishing for love, yet not receiving it, going back in time to try and receive it, and in the end, going into a world of darkness with never receiving the simple love you wished for.
But aside from the story, I really love the compositions. Starting off with a piano background before heading into a guitar. I think this is one of the best compositions I’ve ever heard. It is repetitive, but I believe the whole point was for it to be repetitive, because of the idea that the girl had time traveled back to the past, which somewhat repeated things for her.
Another think I love would be the ending. With those melancholy lyrics and the piano background, she gets up and starts walking, and then we hear a new melancholic piano piece.
This is one of the best tracks from the Owari No Hoshi No Love Song album, and I love it.
My first impression on Owari no Sekai Kara is this: “This is the most Jun Maeda song I’ve ever gotten myself to.” That’s a neutral remark, by the way, and I said that because the narrative went in such a weird fashion. The girl suddenly time traveling because of her desire to be an ideal in the eyes of her beloved but ends up screwing them over and their relationship, and going ahead and telling him the truth as an act of desperation only to find herself in a ruined world… feels like a story that only Jun Maeda can come up with. To be honest I found it more amusing than emotional, but I don’t think that’s a particularly bad thing.
As for the message of the song, it might be that love being powerful does not necessarily mean that it can do all things possible… something like that. Her powers, after all, is born of her strong desire to be his ideal, because she loves him and perhaps she wanted her feelings to be reciprocated. Well, alas.
The composition itself is one of Maeda’s more normal songs… in a sense that it follows the pop music formula more closely. But it’s nonetheless solid, complex, well-composed, quite memorable, and withstands re-listening (if you catch my drift). Yanaginagi’s sweet vocals is effectively poignant and capable of standing out against the strong instrumental. I think this is one of Maeda’s best pop rock music I’ve heard from him so far.
This is gonna be my first post in the Love Song Bookclub. To be honest, I don’t dig the idea of commenting songs that aren’t tied to a film, series or game too much, mainly because I like either linking the music to the story or because I want to explain the story the music is explaining, but standalone songs or albums have stories that are very hard to grasp, let alone link to music, so sometimes I end up getting the feeling that music and story don’t match each other as they should.
Hence, I won’t comment on the story of the songs too much, but rather I’ll focus myself on the title, and music alone (although I’ll, of course, count the voice as another part of the instrument, I just won’t speak a lot about what the lines are saying). In fact, to keep my music critic as clean as possible, I decided to not look at the translated lyrics and to ignore whatever I could understand from the song. Later on, I’ll read them and comment them if I find something interesting enough.
Let’s begin then. The song starts off with a gentle version of the chorus, accompanied by a simple piano that underlines the melody that the voice follows while adding some arpeggios and octavated notes that give some more profundity and complete the frequency spectrum that one would expect from a fully instrumented song while maintaining the instrument count to two. The way this introduction feels is perfect: the voice appears to make a calm and unbiased statement that the rest of the song will build upon. However, the voice’s high ending note makes me think that while that statement is true, it holds a special meaning for the singer.
Then we have a nice transition that settles the main instrumental theme. Drums, piano, and guitar are the instruments that stand out the most right here, although there are some violins too, even though they can barely be heard, so they basically add some more tension to the melody played by the piano and guitar. I can’t find a true meaning for this part, so I just think of it as the introduction to the song and regard the previous part that I commented as the prolog.
Following this, we resume the singing and the instruments immediately relax to play a simplified version of the main theme, dominated by a very rhythmic drum, while the piano and guitar do some chords with a strange rhythm that combines strong times and weak times in measures, giving a peculiar rhythm-harmony as a result. After a couple verses, the guitar drops the strange rhythm and starts playing basic accompaniment chords and, at the same time, the violins get back in to increase the tension thanks to slight crescendo dynamics in almost every note and make it rise gradually with their characteristic timbre that feels unique when amidst pop-rock instruments and compositions.
Once a certain amount of tension has been achieved, the accompaniment radically changes to very basic accompaniment that lets the piano get all the protagonist with a high-pitched, high-volume broken chord accompaniment that, combined with the shift in the vocal melody, raises the tension even further up to its maximum so far, where the piano ceases to play (except for 4 slow notes) and the rest of the instruments half their tempo or even hold a chord for several measures, letting the voice maintain all that tension before it’s released in the chorus.
The chorus comes and causes a great effect on the listener thanks to all the buildup to this point. This chorus strong points are the high pitched endings of the singer, which seem as if she was crying for help, and the violin counterpoint to the singer’s melody. While the main accompaniment or instruments of this song are clearly the drums, guitar, and piano (this last one not so much during the chorus, though), the violins are fundamental to pull off this chorus. I’m impressed by this choice of instruments that Made made and how he used them, although we’ll see more about this later.
The second part of the chorus is quite similar, except that the new voice melody makes it look as if the singer was struggling and fighting for something, rather than crying for help. It’s also worth mentioning how this specific part of the chorus builds up, even more, tension to make up for what was “consumed” during the first part of the chorus. This way, there’ll be a tension peak when we reach the end of the chorus. Finally, the chorus ends with another high-pitched note, although this whole line sounds more calmed than the rest of the chorus. It might be a reflection of the singer looking back to the events happened in the chorus and the results of her effort.
What’s next? Time for another transition and another verse! In this verse, however, the violins start playing from the start. This could probably mean that the situation has become worse or that there is an urge building up as if something has to be done and the deadline keeps getting closer. However, since that’s the only change in the verse, it could be that this situation worsening or urge building up is something that the singer yet doesn’t know, as there’s no reaction from other instruments or the singer.
We then jump to another chorus with no noticeable change, although when it ends, we get to a differently structured verse where the drums become the main accompaniment that counterpoints the voice. It doesn’t last long and doesn’t have too much tension to it apart from it being unexpected. It’s a calm section after the second chorus that allows the listener to not be on full tension-resolve-tension-resolve dynamic for the entirety of the song. However, the last words of this verse have a sudden buildup that resolves into a guitar solo. What’s the meaning of the guitar solo? Well, I don’t think there’s much to it. I like to think of it as if events were happening in the background as if actions that the singer could not influence were taking place. However, musically speaking, both the calmed verse and the guitar solo are very important as they make a break in the song (especially considering that the calmed verse starts after 2’ 49’’ when there are 3’ 8’’ remaining, almost at half song). This break reduces the chances of the listener thinking that the song is repetitive and adds some more color to the general structure of the song).
After this relatively calm break, we come back to the main tension building verse: the one with the broken chord piano accompaniment. After having recovered the tension, it is resolved in the next chorus, although… Surprise surprise! There’s no big resolve and we get another calmed accompaniment version. But Maeda fools us again and we start getting more and more tension from the several instruments adding up to the accompaniment: at the start, just the violins in a very calmed way, then we hear some bass chords just before the drum remembers everyone the tempo with a very simplistic beat. When we got the tension up, everything gets shut down and the voice increases both pitch and dynamics. At the same time, the violin strikes a short-lasting, forte melody that stars the biggest resolve we’ve heard in this song so far.
Here we get our true deserved chorus in an extended version with full accompaniment, with some variations to drums, violin and especially “piano” (this might be strings played from a synthesizer? I don’t really know, it’s the fast climbing notes at 4’ 32’’).
Then we go back to the main instrumental theme, that immediately dies to allow another very calmed chorus accompanied by the piano. If the first one was the prolog, this one is the epilog. This time, the singer, that has been struggling a fucking ton during this last chorus has finally acknowledged all that has happened. She probably explains the conclusions of the actions she took in that chorus, but again, the high-pitched note that, despite being the tonic of the major scale this song is in, doesn’t feel conclusive enough. Thus, I think that this story has finished a chapter, but it isn’t over yet for the singer.
A piano’s calmed melody, with a certain importance to the events that have happened inspired by the octavated notes, brings this song to a conclusion.
At the very end, a crescendo noise (sorry, I can’t identify this instrument nor I like it too much as you can see) appears and links to the following song for reasons that I can’t grasp as off now. Anyway, this doesn’t belong to Owari no Sekai kara so I’ll talk about it in another post.
Now on to my personal impressions, although some of them must’ve definitely gotten filtered at some point during the previous review. This song has become one of my all time favorites, although experience tells me that this is only a feat if it remains with that status for a couple of months. I really loved the changes in pitch that the voice had and how, while every instrument played relatively simple melodies and accompaniments, their use, and combination of such musical voices were very complexly used, especially when we take into account that we are talking about a piano and violin, more or less classical instruments, combined with drums, guitar, and bass: typical jazz, pop, and rock instruments. They are instruments that, although it’s not the same time that they appear together in a song, their combination in this one is just right, with drums, guitar and bass taking the base of the accompaniment, the piano taking the more calmed sections and the counterpoint violin appearing to create tension or resolve it suddenly during the more hectic parts.
And not only this but details like the violins entering before in the second verse than in the first one or the differences in how all the chorus resolve and little variations that some instruments have at certain points are something that I appreciated a lot. Most of the times, when I hear this song, I feel myself listening particularly to a different instrument at each part, because they all get a moment in which they truly shine. It’s this instrument combination complexity what really made me like this song.
Anyway, this is it for now. I don’t think I’ll comment the lyrics as time’s short and I’d rather comment the other songs’ music in this album. By the way, apart from being short on time, and not digging too much the idea of commenting songs, the reason I hadn’t posted anything about the other album is because overall it didn’t appeal too much to me. I mean, there were some neat songs, but overall it didn’t cut it for me.
I appreciate all the feedback and, hey, you, yes you, music experts, I especially want you to spot whatever I’ve fucked up in my analysis because I don’t have a huge amount of knowledge and I might have said something wrong. Thanks in advance!
And so the curtain rises on Owari no Hoshi no Love Song. An incredibly stark contrast from the subdued tone we’d had from the first love song album. It feels like a totally different thing! Actually, it probably is a totally different thing 
We start with a song accompanied by a video and, well, the biggest contrast we have is just how concrete these lyrics are. We are told a very continuous story, of a girl who messed up by traveling back in time. Not much to interpret here as to what actually happens (except why the fuck the worls crumbled, but let’s get into that later)… or is there?
As to what the song wants to say, I think it’s a representative of the amount of self-sacrifice we do for love. Yes, love is a wonderful thing, but because of love, we end up changing ourselves for the sake of that other person. To satisfy them or to get their attention, we slowly start to change to the point that we lose ourselves. We forget our true selves because of the changes we made for love.
Eventually, the person we love begins to miss that old self of ours, and struggles to find it. Unfrotunately, once they realize what we are and what we have become, they no longer want to be part of it. Or perhaps, they do find our old selves, but find that it was not what they had wanted. Either way, our world crumbles to darkness and all becomes lost, as our loved one lets go of us. Thus we end up traveling this now colorless world alone, finding the love we once lost.
That is what I think the song is trying to say, in more layman’s terms. Or at least, that is the message it wants us listeners/viewers to learn.
As for why the world suddenly crumbles? Well, I feel it may be due to a time paradox, from revealing the truth. Perhaps the reason she could timeleap was due to the boy constantly searching for her. Once the boy realized he found her, he stopped searching, she lost her ability to leap, and the universe found out that that timeleaping self of hers had no place in the world, pushing her to the desolate, gray world.
I imagine I might struggle with this part of the bookclub. Most of these songs I listen to regularly and have done so for several years. That means I don’t really have much to discover about them. I mostly just listen to these songs as small doses of Maedamphetamine. I like the music, but I can’t explain why, so I need something else to talk about. As a start I’ll try to look at the engagement curve and see how long that lasts because I don’t think it’ll hold for the entire album.
There’s a pretty big sense of the threshold being crossed in this song. Though it’s stained in failure, so it’s also akin with being expelled from paradise. There’s something comical in how we’re introduced to Owari no Hoshi no Love Song by literally getting thrown into a post apocalyptic waste land abruptly two thirds through the song. We obviously also have to simply deal with the fact that this girl can time travel through a photograph; there’s other weird shit on the horizon.
One thing that stands out to me is that the girl leaves the picture behind. She obviously had an emotional response to the happiness and colors depicted in it, but she leaves that world behind. Perhaps this is a message to us that we are now on the other side of the threshold. Alternatively, she doesn’t want to be weighed down by that place that she can’t go back to, so she will instead focus on using what she learned from that journey to find her smile in this world.
Lastly, this ZEN girl is cute! With a risk of sounding like Bonecuss, that short ponytail just looks really good. They also animate her short hair a lot; it’s very lively. ZEN is just really, really good with hair. I occasionally have issues with his faces, but his hair always looks very nice and smooth. There are two really cute ZEN girls in this albums: this one and the one from Hifukiyama no Mahoutsukai. Her hair also stands out a lot.
Holy shit, Kaza word of 2017?
This is one of my favorite songs on the Owari no Hoshi no Love Song album. The part that made this song for me was the use of repeating onomatopoeia-
ぼろぼろに泣いてきみは探していた
ぼろぼろロになってあの日をみって菊の
ばらばらになった二人をつなごうとした
ぼろぼろになって君にほんと伝えた
ばらばらになったｼﾞ時空に吸い込まれていく
ぼろぼろ (boroboro/ragged or tattered) and ばらばら (barabara/scattered or in pieces) work really well contrasting with each other both phonetically and in meaning and each major section (beginning, middle and end) of the song makes use of these effectively to kind of mark how things progress throughout the happenings in the song. Sigh it just feels so good<3
This song had a video and I watched it. The videos for this album are awesome, but I like this song more without having to face the literal aspects of the story. If I act like everything in this song a metaphor it is a lot more poignant for me.
As of right now I do not have a good feel for how all of these songs relate to each other asides from all presumably relating to the closed world. I felt similarly about Love Song at first though, so I am interested to see if my thinking shifts again during the book club.
At last we reach Owari no Hoshi. I love Love Song, I really do, I own the damn thing, but the vaugeness of the lyrics and highly interpret nature of the thing made it so very hard for me to post. Owari no Hoshi is not like that however, these are clearly separate stories in a shared universe, concise stories that, while you can interperate the lyrics to be meaningful, still have a more straight forward storytelling sense, something I can pick at. The Animations only further assist in that.
With that said, I don’t need to say much about this story, it’s very veeeeery straight forward with only one real point of interpretation as far as the actual story(I’ll get to that later), girl wants to bang, boy wants to bang senpai, girl goes back in time to bang, erases herself, tries to bang the boy anyway as he struggles to find his erased friend, fails(A CONSISTENT THEME IN THIS ALBUM LET ME ASSURE YOU), and is thrown into the ruined world.
That’s actually a fair bit of information for the 5 minutes it’s all told in, but it gets by with the speed and energy of the song, which I looooove, I feel like that has a sort of symbolism in itself, in a flash, her life was ruined and it keeps going and continuing to punch her without missing a beat.
Anyway you guys nailed all the major things this song is trying to tell on a more metaphorical sense, themes I strongly agree with.
Move on with life no matter what, don’t always yearn for the past, be yourself. I care a lot about these ideals, Maeda does too(COUGHLittle BustersCOUGH) so this song really resonates with me.
All of these are good things.
This song does a good job of providing the setting of Owari no Hoshi. It shows, clear as day, impossible to interpret otherwise several facts about the world.
That it was a normal modern world not long before the state its in for the rest of the album.
That Magic is abundant and real in this world.
That you need to strap in for a pain train, the world of Owari no Hoshi no Love Song is not a sugarcoated world, shit is going to go badly for the protagonists.
These are things you could interpret in Love Song, this are things that are facts in Owari no Hoshi, this song makes sure you know that, you don’t need the visuals to tell you, the lyrics are explicit.
And that is why it’s a good opening song to the Album.
And to expand on that last point. Jesus christ Owari-chan:
Finds out her crush wants another girl.
Gives up everything and in the process, erases herself, upsetting her crush immensely.
Has to deal with him frantically searching for her when she’s right there for a few months.
Being told to her face that he liked her when it’s far too late.
Is thrown into a hellish world after all this, never to see him again.
Owari-chan gets emotionally battered, she does not get rewarded, she doesn’t even know if she’ll ever smile again.
Welcome, my friends, to Owari no Hoshi no Love Song, the album made by a man who was upset over his latest baby getting destroyed by shitty producers and extremely poor handling. Strap in, this Album is going to make a message clear to you by the end, people don’t always get what the want.
I’m not done with this song though, because from a story perspective there is still one question I see debated concerning the ending.
Is the ruined world Owari-chans fault?
Personally I subscribe to the theory that she fucked up her time travel rules and got thrown back into her future + the months she spent in the past, into the world that was ruined. But some people don’t think so, some people think her fucking up was the trigger that destroyed the world. You know, because Owari-chan needs another slap in the face after everything else in the song.
I actually know more people who subscribe to the latter, which is interesting, I wonder what Kaza thinks.
But I ain’t even talked about the music!
This is perhaps one of the more normal songs on the album, and that’s fine, that’s not a bad thing per say, rather an observation, the song is still extremely enjoyable to listen too, the Piano is putting in some work. I’ll leave proper analysis to the more musically inclined but there is a few points I can bring up.
The fast pace of the song that I had mentioned earlier, I love it, it lets the whole story get told in a short amount of time and it’s always given me this impression that ‘time is running out’ for Owari-chan(which isn’t true, she fucked up as soon as she timeleaped) which is neat.
But there is one glaring elephant in the room with this song, I mentioned how the story is all told in 5 minutes, but the song is 6 minutes long. This is because of the solid minute at the end where there is just a slow solo piano piece at the end with a still shot of the ruined world.
As a song finisher, I think it overstays its welcome, but looking at it as an Album, this is fantastic, after the first story was such a fast paced poppy song, we get a solid minute of what the setting for the rest of it is, tying back to how I think this is a really good ‘first song’, it’s episode one of Owari no Hoshi no Love Song and preforms that role fantastically, even to the extent that makes it suffer even slightly as a song.
Overall Owari no Sekai Kara is one of my favorite songs on the Album and I can’t praise it enough as a perfect opener. I love the story, I love the message, and I love the song.
My idea of it has always been that she, from her subjective time, leaped into the past but gets thrown back into the present. I mean, the title of the song is “From the World of the End,” and she says in the second to last stanza “From here, I started my time-leap…”. I’m not sure what else people want. I guess it doesn’t help that Shirane added an “again” to that sentence when it’s not needed.
Great insight, @Kanon! I honestly don’t think the ruined world is her fault per se, but rather that the ruined world is sort of a limbo for people like her, who have lost their place in space and time. Perhaps the rest of the inhabitants of that world went through experiences like hers? And perhaps the next stories involve those who have already been put there. Who knows~
There are songs out there like Faraway (Little Busters), The palm of a tiny hand (Clannad) and Red Moon (Disgaea) that trigger a strong emotional response in me whenever I hear them. All it takes is a few notes. I feel the emotions wash over me before I even consciously recognize the song. Well, these songs all remind me of specific, extremely emotional scenes in beautiful stories that I will forever carry with me in my heart. Stories of characters I grew fond of after many hours of reading and playing. So they’re not ‘just’ music. They contain my memories and my emotions.
Owari no Sekai Kara causes the same kind of reaction in my heart despite being a tied to a much shorter story. I guess this proves that a powerful story doesn’t necessarily need to be long and have a huge buildup.
Within a short amount of time, Owari no Sekai kara, despite being rather repetetive in its structure, takes us on a rollercoaster ride of emotions.
It starts with the bliss of being in love. It’s a simple and precioius feeling, as the text points out on several occasions.
But then it shifts into the “so close yet so far away” mood while a sense of urgency immediately takes over. The heroine has made a mistake she can’t fix and we can only watch on while she and her love interest both suffer from it. The little guy is really brave and determined, but it hurts the viewer just as much as the heroine, knowing that his decision will only take him further away from the truth.
But this is where the story takes an unusual turn. Normally, this would be the moment where emotions overtake logic and everyone lays their feelings bare and then they come to a conclusion where everyone can gain closure. Not so here.
Revealing the truth and admitting her mistake only leads to an even more hopeless situation.
In the end, the opening tunes are played again, but slowly. All we are left with is the memory of that beautiful emotion it all started with.
I believe it’s a reversed cymbal. Which actually rather fits with the time leaping stuff.
Alrighty I was super late to this one and most things have already been said so I’m going to dump a theory: each song from Owari no Hoshi is a “failed branch” on a timeline featuring the boy and the girl from Love Song.
Builds off of my other theory post.
The couple from Love Song are trying to make it work. The girl believes that she can deepen their relationship if she learns more about the boy’s past. With that, we enter Owari no Sekai Kara. The girl leaps to the past, etc, then bam: she’s trapped in the past. She can’t return to the present for some time travel reason. She chooses to not tell him that she is from the future because it would erase all the time they had spent together, and knowing that the Love Song was about their struggle to be together, she didn’t want to lose the time they spent growing to love each other.
Spring rolls around, and the boy decides to depart, searching for love. This aligns with the Spring where the girl fell in love in Hoshi Naru Ishi, just that the roles are switched (Spring is the season of love I guess). Deciding that some love was better than no love, the girl reveals everything. Here is where it gets interesting. The line “before I knew it, I was swallowed into the crumbled time-space” most literally describes some wonky time travel stuff, but I take it to represent the feelings she had at that very moment: her world was falling apart (and closing, but I’ll get to that later). Why did confessing make her feel this way? Because the boy rejected her. Having never gone through the events of Love Song with the girl, she was basically a stranger to him. So naturally he says something like “huh?” and the girl gets destroyed. Here, a new branch on the timeline is born: one where the “true” end (the end of Love Song) is locked (or closed, heh). Sometimes being rejected feels like there is no love left in the world. Yet, the girl has not given up hope. She will continue to journey (by “walk[ing] forward”) through this new loveless world.
That’s pretty crazy man 
This is my favorite song on the album. I feel bad for the girl. She wanted to find happiness but she ended up making both herself and the boy she loved suffer.
