Composition

The album's concept is for a set of songs revolving around "worlds that are headed towards destruction". Although Maeda notes that each song is a self-contained story, he aimed for the whole album to have a single overarching story. In mid-2011, Maeda was so enthusiastic about writing the songs that it took him a little less than one month from beginning to end to write all 13 tracks.^[1] Maeda spent about three days writing each song: two days for composing the music and one day for writing the lyrics. Maeda had originally wanted to write enough songs for a two-CD album, but he realized that it would take too long to record so many songs. Instead of writing lyrics that would fit with Yanagi's image as a singer, Maeda wanted to take a different approach to writing lyrics than he had done up to that point. This is one reason why he wrote "Killer Song" as a song about killing people. "Kōru Yume" (literally: "Frozen Dream") was Maeda's first attempt at writing a song as a poetry reading because he thought a song like that would be interesting in an album. Instead of writing it as a song, Maeda tried to focus on the mood expressed in the song through diary entries. For the high-tempo songs, Maeda made it a point to overall increase the beats per minute compared to songs he had written up to then.^[1]

The concept for "Muteki no Soldier" (literally: "Invincible Soldier") was to write a song similar to a battle theme from a role-playing video game during a fight against a boss. When Yanagi first heard "Muteki no Soldier", she did not think someone could sing it because of its high tempo, and its rapid and dense lyrics. When Yanagi tried to practice singing it at home, she would lose her breath trying to keep up with the song. Maeda had thought about removing half the lyrics, but Yanagi was invigorated by the challenge and eventually was able to sing it. During the recording of "Killer Song", one of the first songs to be recorded, Maeda felt that the song improved in unexpected ways. Compared to when Yanagi practiced singing the songs at home, she found different ways to sing them when being directed during the recording sessions. Yanagi felt that the songs required a determined focus, and that if she cut corners even slightly, the songs would end up disjointed.^[1]

All of the music was written exclusively by Maeda except for "Hero no Jōken" (literally: "Conditions of a Hero") which was a joint composition with his friend Taisei Nakagawa. An assortment of session musicians perform the songs on the album, including a guitarist, a drummer, two pianists, three violinists, two violists, and a cellist. The Suginami Junior Chorus is credited for the chorus of the song "Kono Hoshi no Birthday Song" (literally: "This World's Birthday Song"), which includes Kōjirou Ōishi, Kazuma Miyajima, Airi Honda, Riko Takao, Hinata Kurioka and Risa Kubo. Owari no Hoshi no Love Song was mixed by Shunroku Hitani, Kentarō Ino, Katsumi Inoue, Kafuka P and Eiichi Nishizawa. Kōtarō Kojima provided the mastering.^[2]

Artwork

The albums' packaging, designed by Minato Kawai of PMMK, includes the song lyrics in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. Each song is given an illustration by an artist, and these illustrators are listed below with the track listing. The cover art is by GotoP, and features different art for the limited and regular editions. The limited edition shows a boy in tattered clothes sitting in a forest with his back to a tree, and a girl in a white dress is resting her head on his lap. The regular edition features the same girl as before, but she is now standing in front of a nearly all-white background looking down at some flowers. Maeda handled the art direction.^[2]