31 Days of Game Music: The World Ends with You

"Calling" is the de facto main theme to The World Ends with You. That honor is officially conferred on "Twister," which has umpteen remixes on the main album alone, but that has more to do with "hey hey look our JRPG has a rap song" than quality. "Calling," however, is an anthem for the theme expressed by the title - which is, in fact, not the threat you might initially think but a reminder that your world is only as big as you make it. The game itself is an exhortation to open up to your surroundings, an idea the song embodies smartly in its teen-pop milieu.

Nice, but what sells "Calling" is its sound: transcendent yet modern, like its opening synth that keeps spiraling up and up and up without seeming end. From its young female vocalists to its airy surging synth, it's aggressively positive, like the game's message, yet light and contemporary. It stands out in the game's urban setting yet doesn't clash with it.

In fact, it's intriguing how "Calling"'s two seemingly disparate elements - the sweet vocalists and the metallic synth - work with each other in the song's purpose. The end result is techy and modern but not cold; it's hopeful and young and happy. Yet perhaps that's not a contradiction in The World Ends with You, whose protagonist initially uses his mp3 player and headphones to block out the world at large, yes, but whose heroine keeps her best friend ever close through a cell phone pic and whose prickly hero is kept mentally afloat by the popular media produced by his favorite artist. So many works explore the war between technology and human contact that it's nice to encounter a game that considers how, with conscientious use, one can support the other in today's society.
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