The festival is a celebration of the Tales of series, as well as an event for announcing forthcoming new games. This year’s festival was held on 14th June 2009 and BACK-ON were invited to perform flyaway and Re:Start, songs that most fans will know as the OP and ED (respectively) theme songs from Tales of the World : Radiant Mythology 2.

According to various reports, they wow’d the audience with their thrilling renditions of both songs:  Gpara said that ‘they single handedly roused the crowd’ during their performance.

BACK-ON later invited Ito Kanae (伊藤かな恵) – Kanonno Earhart‘s seiyuu – who featured in the flyaway [Tales of] remix – to join them onstage; she was too nervous to actually sing in front of the crowd.

BACK-ON with Ito Kanae courtesy of Gpara

The photos are courtesy of Gpara.com,  Dengeki.com and Famitsu.com, and you can view them in full by visiting the Tales of Festival 2009 section of the Gallery.

p/s: Although BACK-ON have posted a photo of the event,  Icchan and Kenji03 also talked briefly about the event in their official blog, they did manage to get hold of some nice programmes!

photo by ooishi nami

p/s2: For fans wanting to know more about the new Tales of games that were announced at the Festival, please visit the dedicated Tales of fansite Abyssal Chronicles for detailed information.

The news was posted on the band’s official site earlier in the week, and the information was further confirmed by an article on GPara.com (scroll to almost the end of the article) which mentioned Back-0n (and posted the band’s group photo as well!) and seemed to say that Light and Wind would be the key themes for the song. I don’t think this will be a difficult task for the band at all, because a lot of their music *does* follow this philosophy!

You can watch the promotional trailer for the game on the official website, and although I don’t own a PSP, there already seems to be quite a bit of hype from the major PSP-gaming sites such as: PSP Fanboy and PSPHyper, where the latter also includes extra screenshots in a later post.

However, for a more introductory approach to the new continuation of the Tales of the World series, the best place to visit is probably the Wikipedia entry. No official release date has been announced yet, but the plan is for Winter 2008. Of course, this is great news for us Back-on fans – it means we have something good to look forward to! :)