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.

Featured are 42 second clips of:

• flyaway (Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2 OP)
• where is the future? (Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2 ED)
• flyaway 『テイルズ オブ』Remix (Special remix of the title track available as an extra in the special [Tales of] edition of the single)

To summarise, flyaway is just as good as we expected from the original 30 second preview of the song; where is the future? seems reminiscent of one of BACK-ON’s previous title songs flower, but the biggest (and best) surprise imho is probably flyaway 『テイルズ オブ』Remix or flyaway [Tales of] Remix!

For fans of dance or game background music, this is a must listen, but the preview is alas so very short! Teeda‘s voice is electronically altered, and with thanks to BOO forum member Sok for this information, apparently the singer of the main chorus (at least in this preview clip) is the female seiyuu of Kanonno, the main character in the Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2 series!

In addition to clips of the 3 songs (sadly missing Re:Start) BACK-ON have also posted a much longer video clip of the flyaway PV on their official Myspace as well! :) I think it is pretty safe to say that everyone on the Forums who has seen the PV preview so far likes it.

You can watch it after the cut (as usual) at the end of this post, or you can:

watch the PV preview on BACK-ON’s Myspace by clicking here!

Last but not least, for fans and visitors who do not have access to Myspace, you can also listen to the clips of all 3 songs after the cut as well! Either way, please enjoy and let us know what you think! :)

BACK-ON – flyaway (Myspace audio)

1. flyaway
2. where is the future?
3. flyaway[Tales of]Remix
   

BACK-ON – flyway PV preview (Myspace video)

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Although there is no hint of this on their website, the news is official, as it was included on an informational flyer with YES!!! It was quite a surprise when this small sheet of paper came fluttering out as I unfolded the CD insert, and you can see for yourself what I saw:

At that moment, I actually quite *forgot* that I was meant to be excited about YES!!! and jumped around for this instead. If you can read a bit of Katakana or are feeling resourceful enough to find one of those helpful pronunciation tables on Google Images, the blurb at the bottom of the leaflet says something like:

Bandai Namco game: Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2‘s theme song “flyaway” is the title track of the 3 song (single)…

This could be better translated (please let us know in the comments or by email!) but interestingly, aside from the fact that the single will be released just a day before the actual game, like other subscribers of CDJapan’s Artist Newsmail list for BACK-ON, I received an Artist Update email listing TWO different editions of the CD. One is known as flyaway [Jacket A] and the other flyaway [Limited Pressing/Jacket B]!

For an extra 200 yen, flyaway [Limited Pressing/Jacket B] supposedly offers the magical world of First Press, which is defined by CDJapan to be:

a sticker, serial number for cell-phone ringtone and standby screen (valid only in Japan.)

for people lucky early enough to order the first batch of CDs. Now, the BACK-ON fangirl in me screams “HOLY ZOMG First Press FTW!” but from my limited experience of owning two different editions of Chain (one of my favourite singles by far by the way) if you do decide to pre-order flyaway, it will probably NOT be the end of the world if you receive flyaway [Jacket A] instead.

Besides, it’s still too early to make that decision yet imho, as we don’t even know what the CD cover looks like, but please do continue checking back here for more updates as January 28th 2009 draws nearer! In the meantime, I’ll leave you with news of what is to come:

• Fan reviews of YES!!! - 4 members of our Fan Forums have kindly volunteered to write a review of BACK-ON‘s first full length album, which we will be featuring on the site very soon!
• Random tidbits – Bits and pieces of news that we’ve meant to tell you about but haven’t quite got round to it; this includes multimedia and even a remix of Taneuma!

Last but not least, we would like to congratulate Sesshy on becoming Head Admin of Sound-Ex! You can also check out her newest wallpaper for YES!!! on our forums here, which looks professional enough to be an official promotional poster!

Sound-Ex will be launching a brand new layout for YES!!! very soon, so don’t forget to visit them as it is always worth it, although another site that you might like to visit whilst waiting might be the Facebook BACK-ON Fan Group run by Laura; there are currently 74 members and is quite a friendly community!

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! :)