New Arrival

[Zemekis]

Hi everyone, you can call me Zemekis. Although registration is closed, I am lucky enough to have known Koby (however vaguely) from another forum and was able to get back in. I swear I registered an account in July 2022, but as far as I can tell now...I didn't. Thus, here's my introduction! Having read Nekone's post about the future of the forum, I fear that I may be arriving too late, but if I can bring even a little activity back to the boards here I'd be happy to. I feel that too many folks gravitate towards the same 3 or 4 "big tech" social media sites these days, and have been trying to get more active on niche forums like Kametsu while I still can. Maybe I'm fighting an unwinnable battle, but I don't care. Hobby-specific platforms like this are important. I was massively active in the Outlaw Star scene as a 2nd-in-command similar to what I understand Nekone's role to be here. The forum software got too old, shut down, and the community moved to Discord which I am not interested in. It's not so much that I hate Discord itself, as that I dislike the fleeting nature of posts on there. It's more akin to a chat room and the conversations I've seen feel like they hold less weight than a forum post.

 

• How did you find Kametsu?

Koby mentioned it in a post & forum sig elsewhere. I saw the name and wondered "what's Kametsu?" ...and here I am.

• What do you think of the place so far?

I wish I had either found it earlier or at least became active when I first visited last Summer. I've been a Trails fan since the PSP release of TitS, so the forum background with Trails characters told me rather quickly that I'm in the right place.

• How active are you planning on being?

I don't want to over-promise, so I'll say "moderately." Some of that will depend on whether a few other posters are going to join me. I won't be active on Discord, but I may pop into IRC from time to time. I'm primarily a forum guy.

• What are your top five anime?

1. Outlaw Star
2. InuYasha
3. Bleach
4. FLCL (original)
5. Death Note

• Top five video games?

1. Final Fantasy VIII
2. Majora's Mask
3. Ocarina of Time
4. Brave Fencer Musashi
5. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

• What other hobbies do you have?

Shortwave radio
Cheesemaking
Brewing (beer)
Travel. My wife is from Japan so I travel there frequently, South Korea once in a while too.

• Make any graphics?

Nope. Don't have an artistic bone in my body, unfortunately.

• Do you have any questions for us?

I'm curious about the forum's history. It appears that this was a place for anime/game files at some point, and the forum is much older than I first thought. 2006? Where can I learn about the major events that went down here?

Edited December 7, 2023 by Zemekis
Bullet-lists caused the formatting to be wonky

[Koby]

Howdy Zemekis. Always a nice day when old faces or names show back up out of the blue as it brings back memories of old. As you've alluded to, forums are definitely a dying breed and it seems like breathing life back into them is an impossible task for them. It's like living on life support at this time. Even our own community has mostly faded away, but for the handful that remain, they almost entirely ignore the forum in favor of our Discord, in similar fashion to the Outlaw Star community you spoke of.

 

Hyped for Trails Through Daybreak releasing this coming Summer. I've played the previous 10 games that are out currently. I tried playing Daybreak 1 with the fan translation patch, but it just wasn't for me. The translation is a bit too dry and literal and the grammar mistakes come across like a lack of polish on the quality control side of things.

 

A bit of forum history, the name Kametsu actually started as a Yugioh forum in 2004. A few of my buddies communities merged into it and we ended up getting the domain in 2005 and moved on to anime as a whole.

 

In the meantime I was already running another forum community as well, which started in 2001, known as Dark Fantasy RPG. It originally was a roleplaying board where we actually roleplayed a story with our characters in forum format. We eventually dropped RPG from the name and became Dark Fantasy, and over time the roleplay aspect died off and we became more of a jrpg video game forum with a large focus on Final Fantasy. At some point the forum died due to hackers and a lack of time on my part so I temporarily shut it down and then it was revived with a new name known as Forgotten Memories. At that point we opened a full on fansite for square enix games with a big focus on posting the latest related news. We grew pretty massive with a few hundred thousand users and a few million posts. But the forum software, ipb 1.3 had known exploits and hackers utilized that to destroy it. We had backups, but the damage was already done.

 

In 2006, we started over and bought a vBulletin license. This is the current iteration of the forum database and why the earliest dates showcase 2006, such as on my account creation date. You see at this point, we merged Forgotten Memories forum and Kametsu forum userbases into one forum under the Kametsu brand with a fresh start. I created our own unique forum theme and everything and had it looking really nice.

 

It was also around this time I stepped into the foray of video encoding and the anime fansub scene... and around 2008 we added a download section to the forum. Things just bloomed from there. In 2010 or 2011, Cartoon-World, a large community focused on anime and cartoon downloads shut down and directed their userbase here, effectively merging but without importing the database. C-W users had to start over fresh, but they ported over a lot of their work and the main staff members there became staff here.

 

Nekone actually ran Cartoon-Palace, a competitor to Cartoon-World back in these days too.

 

While I had been releasing things under the Kametsu tag myself, we didn't have an official team of encoders and subbers until around 2012 when some of the community members suggested it and offered to come aboard to start releasing shows under the brand. Kametsu eventually became the largest dual-audio anime release brand out there.

 

Though the cartoon section was rapidly growing as well, with a lot of folks directing others here through places like Reddit. We eventually became the go-to place for the earliest postings of the latest cartoon episodes... and this brought on a lot of creators. We even had a few of them join the community and comment (nicely I might add, which is suprising given we were effectively a pirate community). Such as Steven Universes' creator. He shared some insights and behind the scenes info and it was fantastic to behold.

 

Then FUNimation and the like started the "Simuldub/Dubcast" slogans with streaming anime dubs same day or just a few weeks after the subtitled version premiered. With this, Kametsu created a child-group known as LostYears in which we'd add the dub audio to a fansub release for optimum viewing without waiting for Blurays.

 

Unfortunately with fame comes unwanted onlookers and we eventually caught the eye of FUNimation. Because we had not initially started with the intentions of becoming a pirate haven and because I was a naive kid with little money back in the day, I didn't fork over the cash to private registration information on the domain ORIGINALLY... and also used my real first name as my username. Making it very easy for interested parties to track down and identify me. We had a long talk and to prevent handing over any user info and prevent a lengthy & costly trial in which we had no hope of coming out on top in, we agreed to seize all piracy and remove all content related to that. In doing so, the case was dropped, we didn't have to hand over anything, and we were allowed to continue operating in the way you see now.

 

Sadly despite an active userbase at the time. They practically all abandoned the place, attacked us for doing what we had to, and just to refuse to understand the situation we were placed in. Loyalty and friendship obviously didn't matter nearly as much to the community as I always believed it did.

 

While the Kametsu release group disbanded, LostYears did not. They separated ties, the LY blog was discontinued, and the reins were passed on to others to carry on the name. To this day LostYears remains an active release group of Simuldub sourced dual-audio releases mostly muxing existing fansubs but also with plenty of their own original fansubs as well.

[Zemekis]

Fascinating stuff, Koby. I appreciate you taking the time to explain everything to a newbie like me. I had no clue this place intersected with so many forms of media & communities. 2001...wow. I wasn't even 10 years old yet. I wish I had jumped in on Dark Fantasy, sounds like a place for me during its Final Fantasy years. Being so young at the time, I never got to experience the height of forum culture alongside the golden JRPG years. A lot of my time being a Final Fantasy fan has been looking into the past & sounding like an old man. Yearning for the 90's era to return.

 

Back to Kametsu and its associated fansub groups for a moment. I suppose I have you to thank, at least tangentially, for the LostYears releases I've watched. I was completely unaware that you were involved in the fansubbing world. I applied to a few groups many years ago (20008 - 2010?), but I didn't know the first thing about timing and was rejected, haha. I did eventually get involved with scanning, typesetting and translation for a period of time in the manga scene, however. I remember Cartoon-World and Cartoon-Palace! I used C-W for some Pokémon releases, I think...I was helping a friend of mine from college put together an external HDD with the "complete" works of Pokémon. Or at least as complete as we could manage. Are you friendly with any other group founders or current leaders?

I'm stoked for Trails Through Daybreak as well! I believe we briefly spoke about Azure or Cold Steel IV at some point? I saw you playing one of them on Steam and asked how you were enjoying it. Perhaps it was Reverie.

As stated in the OP, I started with TitS FC on PSP, but I hadn't realized that it was anything special or part of a larger series. My girlfriend at the time took dance lessons and I drove her, so I played 30-45 minutes each week in the front lobby while waiting. At most, I cleared the Prologue and Chapter 1, missing plenty of BP along the way from hidden quests and dialogue choices. Years later, I got Cold Steel I for my birthday and played straight through, not realizing that it was related to Sky FC. A bit of Googling later, and I became aware of how expansive the story/series truly is. At this point I've completed Sky FC up through Cold Steel II. I'm trying to finish CS III, IV, and Reverie before Daybreak releases!! I have a 1-month trip to Japan from Feb - March so that may throw a wrench in my plans, haha.

Apologies if this post was a bit all over the place. Sometimes introducing oneself can cover a lot of ground all at once. It's a shame that so many of your users ditched once you were backed into a legal corner. My guess is that they were really here for the free anime, not the community. I say "shame" because community has a lot of inherent value in my opinion, and this place seems to have an impressive history. Loyalty and friendship matter quite a lot to me, but I'm probably not an average internet user (it's more than likely why I wound up contacting someone directly to register for a quiet forum I found on someone's signature).

Regardless of the ups and downs of Kametsu's history, thanks for having me.

[Koby]

I was 12 in 2001.

 

Most of the folks I associated with that founded other groups and such have all retired. Sakura, the owner of C-W, is still around too but he mostly hangs out on the IRC.

 

Cman and Forge from AniPas I'm friends with on Steam. We don't chat very often but I see them their gaming activity lol.

 

So have you played Trails From Zero and Trails to Azure? The Crossbell duology intersects with Cold Steel 1 & 2 as they happen during the same in-universe time frame. With Cold Steel 3 a lot of the characters from those start making appearances and Reverie really ties the knot on the three arcs up to that point: Liberl (Sky games), Crossbell (Zero/Azure), and Erebonia (Cold Steel).

 

On another note, Forgotten Memories is long gone, but you can always check out the site in the WayBack Machine Archives. Old domain was forgottenmem.net

 

Though I still have this domain operational: https://shadowhearts.info but that site hasn't seen any updates in like a decade other than announcing the upcoming Shadow Hearts spiritual successor that was kickstarted: Penny Blood. Just a neat little history in a small corner of the internet.

[Zemekis]

10 minutes ago, Koby said:

So have you played Trails From Zero and Trails to Azure? The Crossbell duology intersects with Cold Steel 1 & 2 as they happen during the same in-universe time frame. With Cold Steel 3 a lot of the characters from those start making appearances and Reverie really ties the knot on the three arcs up to that point: Liberl (Sky games), Crossbell (Zero/Azure), and Erebonia (Cold Steel).

Oh, don't worry! I'm very aware of the series order/timeline these days. I just had no clue back in 2012 when I played Sky FC or when I played Cold Steel I upon release in English. I've completed Sky FC > SC > the 3rd > Zero > Azure > CS I > CS II thus far. I'm very much looking forward to Reverie, as I've heard that its the intersection of many characters/storylines. I know I could blast through them all and play Daybreak with the text-replacement tool, but I can't stand the look of it from what I've seen. It reads a bit too dry and literal to me as well, I think we can agree on that. Happy to wait for a physical release on PS5 for Daybreak. I picked up FC, SC, 3rd, and Zero for PC while I was at Super Potato in Tokyo a few years back. It's somewhat lopsided, but I do have the full lineup on the shelf.

[Arisien]

Hiya! I find it a little sad that forums like these are dying out to giant social media platforms. Unfortunately not that many topics get started here, but if you are looking for free games or to expand your vocabulary, then the forum has got you covered xD. Hope to see you around!

[Koby]

Having registrations temporary closed certainly hasn't helped anything.

 

*wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* @Nekone

[Zemekis]

On 12/8/2023 at 10:57 AM, Arisien said:

Hiya! I find it a little sad that forums like these are dying out to giant social media platforms. Unfortunately not that many topics get started here, but if you are looking for free games or to expand your vocabulary, then the forum has got you covered xD. Hope to see you around!

 

Thanks for the welcome, @Arisien. I wasn't quite sure if anyone would even see my introduction, but I'm glad to see that some folks are still lurking here. I'll keep an eye on the free games thread & make an attempt at reviving a few conversations around here. You'll definitely see me around. It looks as if you're fairly new as well?

 

20 hours ago, Koby said:

Having registrations temporary closed certainly hasn't helped anything.

 

*wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* @Nekone

 

Haha, that would probably help but I didn't want to be a nag. I stopped by multiple times before reaching out to Koby directly via Steam to get an account here. I would have been posting sooner if registrations were open. A friend of mine is looking to join as well (I think he may have jumped into the Discord server a few days ago?). If the email server continues being an issue, perhaps I'll ask you to make him an account as well. He's a buddy of mine from those Outlaw Star forum days.