[2][3] On April 20, Utada's song "Kiss & Cry" began to be used in commercials for Nissin Foods' Freedom Project advertising campaign, and was released as a digital download on May 31.

[4][5] Utada's recording of the jazz standard "Fly Me to the Moon", originally found on her "Wait & See (Risk)" (2000) single, was rearranged and released as a digital download on June 29.

[12] "Beautiful World" was released as a double A-side with "Kiss & Cry," which premiered on August 29, 2007, through Toshiba-EMI as a CD single and a digital download.

[13][14] In 2009, the song was rearranged for the second film of the Rebuild of Evangelion series, as "Beautiful World (Planitb Acoustica Mix)".

Utada worked with Russell McNamara, who had previously made remixes of her songs "Distance", "Traveling", "Hikari" and "Simple and Clean" between 2001–2002.

Director Hideaki Anno specifically requested the version be created as he believed "One Last Kiss" would not be long enough for the credit sequence.

This included R&R Newsmaker, What's In?, CD Data, Barfout!, Oricon Style, Pia, Pop Teen and Patipati.

[26][27] CDJournal reviewers described Utada as singing about "earnest love and deep prayers in a rhythmic tempo", and noted "a painful beauty where transience and passion live together" in the song.

[28][29] Tetsuo Hiraga of Hot Express gave an extremely positive review of the song, feeling in awe of the emotional sensitivity of Utada's lyrics and how well they resonated with Evangelion.

[37] However, "Beautiful World" performed better digitally, with the song individually selling over one million downloads and 500,000 ringtones nationwide.

[39] All tracks are written by Hikaru UtadaPersonnel details were sourced from "Beautiful World" / "Kiss & Cry"'s liner notes booklet.