Final Fantasy VII Remake / Rebirth miss the mark

 Note that technically speaking this post contains a spoiler of the idea of these games, but said idea is actually so vague and, in fact, so unconfirmed that it may just as well not count as a spoiler at all.

When Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced, it seemed that it would be just that: A modern remake of the original Final Fantasy VII. In other words, same story, same characters, same events, but completely newly made from the ground up using modern game technology.

And that it was... to a large extent. The game actually contains aspects that the original game did not. And these are not just cosmetic, or something like ancillary extra mini-games or side quests or the like, but embedded right into the main story.

You see, from time to time some dark ghost-like beings appear and affect the events that are happening. It is explained that these are so-called "Whispers" and it's alluded that they exist and intervene to ensure that the course of destiny is not altered by correcting any deviations from this course.

It is not, however, very clearly explained what this actually means, what the significance of the introduction of these "Whisper" entities is, and why they are there.

It is somewhat alluded, and people have speculated (and here comes the "spoiler"), that this is actually not just the original Final Fantaxy VII using modern graphics and technology. This is actually a parallel universe, or a parallel history, where things have subtly changed. And, moreover and most crucially, it is hinted that the Sephiroth of another timeline is the one trying to change the events (and the "Whispers" are trying to undo what he is doing.)

In other words, this new Final Fantasy VII Remake is, possibly, a story of "what would happen if Sephiroth from another parallel dimension or timeline tried to change the course of history of the original game?"

If that's indeed what the idea is, it would actually be an awesome one. There are so many possibilities that could be derived from it. Another parallel-universe Sephiroth is trying to change the course of the original events so that he does not lose in the end, he is trying to meddle with the timeline to change things in his favor. The Whispers are trying to undo his meddling, but he is trying to do it anyway.

Just imagine the possibilities.

And the title of the game, "Remake"? It not only alludes to this being a literal remake of the original, but it also alludes to this in-universe change in the story: Sephiroth is literally trying to "remake" the universe for his own gain. 

The problem? Or, more accurately, problems:

Firstly, this entire idea is extremely vaguely and poorly explained in the game. I myself didn't understand it until I read about it online later. While playing the game I wasn't even aware that something like this might be going on and that this is what the core idea of this remake was. And even after the explanation, it's actually not all that unambiguous and clear that this is actually what they are going for.

It would have been so much cooler if the game had depicted these changes in the timeline much more clearly and unambiguously. Something goes clearly differently from the original. Perhaps one of the character (perhaps Aerith, who is quite special, or perhaps Cloud) gets an instinct that "something is not as it should be." Something like that. Something that clearly signals that something has changed, something is different from the original, from what it should have been.

But no, neither game so far does this at all. (There are some extremely vague and unexplained things happening to Cloud, like he is confused at points or having some kind of reaction to stuff, but it's left completely unclear what it is about.) 

Secondly, both games are following the original's plot way too closely, if this is indeed the direction they are going for. Heck, people have made step-by-step comparisons of the key events and plot points of the new games and the original, and the new ones follow them really, really closely, without much change. Especially the second game seems to almost have dropped the entire idea of "Whispers" completely, and feels like just a pure remake of the middle third of the original.

If the core idea with this remake trilogy is to have Sephiroth change the timeline from the original, Square is doing a really poor job at implementing this idea. In fact, after having played the two first games in the trilogy, it almost feels like Square tried to go a bit in that direction in the first game, barely, and then almost completely abandoned the idea in the second game! I don't remember seeing a single allusion to any changes happening (if there were, they were extremely subtle and inconspicuous. Pretty much "easter eggs.") 

So far the games have been a disappointment, and that interesting core idea has been completely wasted. We'll see if the third game will change things. I'm guessing not, with perhaps the exception of the finale. (And possibly the third game might actually not kill off Aerith.) 

"ET phone home" was difficult to translate to Spanish, yet it worked

The 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was an enormous hit in the 1980's, and is one of the classic movies that defined the decade. In retrospect, it's pretty astonishing how immensely popular some movies, like Star Wars and E.T. got in the pre-internet era. It was just everywhere.

The most iconic line in the movie, something that is probably the only line that most people even remember, is the famous: "ET phone home" (while pointing towards the sky, of course.)

The movie was also immensely popular in Spain back then. Curiously, that line happens to be unusually difficult to translate properly to Spanish, and I'm sure the translator struggled quite a bit with it.

You see, "phone" is both a noun and a verb, and in this case the duality of meaning is completely intentional and taken advantage of by the script writer. As a noun it means the physical device, and as a verb it means "call (by phone)". In the context of the movie the duality works perfectly because it is pretty much used to mean both at the same time. It's almost like word play.

And as with most word play, it can be incredibly difficult to translate to other languages.

The Spanish translators had a decision to make: Translate is as the noun "phone" ("teléfono"), or translate it as the verb "phone", which essentially means "call" ("llamar"). Because in the context of the movie the word was being used as a sort of word play meaning both, it was not a clear choice to make.

There is also the slight extra difficulty in that verbs in Spanish are highly inflected. "Llamar" is just the basic form, when referring to the act itself. If you want to say "I call home" you don't use "llamar", but instead "llamo"... if you are using the present tense. Future tense, past tense, imperative, all use different inflections. If you just use the basic form "llamar" you sound like someone who doesn't know how to speak Spanish and are looking up the word in a dictionary (which, incidentally, might have actually worked here because ET didn't speak English almost at all in the movie in the first place.)

Regardless, I personally believe that "llamar" would have been the better translation for "phone", ignoring its dual meaning. It would have been essentially "ET call home", which I think would have worked (even if using the basic form of the verb.)

Yet, for some reason, however, the translators decided to go with the noun instead, ie. "telephone", ie. "teléfono" in Spanish. I'm not exactly sure why, but I suppose back in 1982 translators weren't so meticulous with their translations and might have been doing a bit of a sloppy job. Maybe they just lazily thought "phone means a telephone, so just translate it as such."

So you have to imagine ET saying "ET telephone home", with "telephone" not being a verb in any way, just a pure noun referring to the physical device. It kind of still works, but still...

But that's not all. Turns out that "ET phone home" is doubly difficult because of that last word, ie. "home".

Spanish has two expressions that mean "home" that are in common use: "Mi casa" (which literally translates to "my house") and "hogar".

The thing is that neither one is really a good translation for "home" in this case.

Both refer explicitly to the domicile where you live, nothing else. Both lack completely the alternative broader meanings of "home", which could mean eg. "home city", "home country" or, in this case, even "home world." And, in fact, technically speaking ET in the movie wasn't even intending to call his home world, but his spaceship, with the other aliens, who in this case represented his world, his home.

There isn't really a word in Spanish that has that meaning.

So if the translation for "phone" was a hard choice to make, "home" was significantly harder. At least for "phone" there are words for both meanings, but for "home" (in this context) there really aren't. In a way, there actually are no words for any of the possible meanings of "home", preserving the exact same tone.

So how did they end up translating it? Once again, they went the lazy route and just used "mi casa". Which doesn't really fit at all.

So, indeed, in Spanish it was: "ET, mi casa, teléfono." Which literally translates to: "ET, my house, telephone" (with "telephone" being purely a noun that refers to the device.)

It is quite an irksome lazy translation because quite literally and explicitly ET was not calling his "house". He wanted to call his people in his space ship. Nothing even remotely related to his "house".

Yet, that's exactly how it was translated: "ET, my house, telephone." While referring to his people.

The translation is jarring. Yet, miraculously, it worked. "ET, mi casa, teléfono" became an incomprehensible hit, even a meme (long before even the concept of "meme" was coined.)

And the thing is, I don't think most people were using it in a mocking way, ie. laughing at it, at how bad the translation was. The vast, vast majority of Spaniards had absolutely no idea what the original English version was (all movies are dubbed in Spain), nor did they have any idea of how bad the translation was.

I suppose people were a bit more naive and innocent back in 1982 than they are today.

 

By the way, if I were tasked to translate it to Spanish, I would probably translate it as "ET call family", in other words, "ET llamar familia". It might not be exactly as fluent and have the exact same tone as "ET phone home", but it would be a hundred times less awkward than "ET, my house, telephone".

Other possibilities would be "ET call friends" and "ET call my people", but neither of those sound very good in Spanish. Although the former, ie. "ET llamar amigos", might have worked acceptably, it just somehow doesn't carry that same tone. It might be a bit ambiguous about who these "friends" are. I think "family" (even though the other aliens might not have been his literal family) would have worked better in this regard. And "ET call my people" just doesn't work well in Spanish, in this context, in my opinion.

Why is String Theory still taken seriously?

General Relativity is quite exotic from the perspective of everyday life, and the theory and math behind it is quite complicated. Yet, it works. We can observe and measure its effects with extreme accuracy, and we have without exaggeration millions of actual tangible empirical corroborations that it is indeed a real thing, and actually describes how the universe works with an amazing amount of detail.

It also has practical applications. Or, perhaps more precisely, many practical applications need to take General Relativity into account for them to work properly. GPS might be the most often cited example: If relativistic time dilation effects were not taken into account (because satellites are much higher up in Earth's gravity well than the surface), results would drift very considerably quite quickly. Also things like atomic clocks actually need to take into account their distance from Earth's center of mass and adjust their results accordingly, and fully in line with the General Relativity equations. And those are just a couple of examples.

Needless to say, the accuracy of General Relativity has been measured and tested to death, and it just works.

Quantum Mechanics is every more esoteric than General Relativity. Yet, in many ways it's even more supported by actual observations, measurements and testing, and has even more practical applications that can actually be used in real life. Not only are there many applications where quantum effects need to be taken into account (similar to how relativistic effects have to) and can be directly observed, but there are many, many situations where the quantum effects themselves have practical applications.

Particle physics is closely tied to Quantum Mechanics, but it is, perhaps slightly adjacent to it, and often slightly less esoteric, but still quite wild at times. And we have an absolutely enormous amounts of practical applications for it. Heck, the very computer you are using right now to read this would not exist without the results and practical applications of particle physics. 

Now consider String Theory.

It has been around for over 50 years now. How many observations, measurements and tests do we have that corroborate its results?

None.

How many practical applications do we have where the effects of String Theory need to be taken into account, else results would be incorrect or drift, or the application would just outright not work?

None.

How many practical applications do we have that use the effects described by String Theory to their advantage? In other words, how many practical applications has String Theory produced?

None.

By this point it should have been discarded as just one of the myriads and myriads of other hypotheses that were seriously presented but then discarded due to lack of evidence.

Yet, for some unfathomable reason, many scientists are still taking it seriously and studying it, even though to this day they have zero evidence for it. It can't be measured, it can't be observed, it can't be tested, it has no predictive power, it has no practical applications. Nothing. Yet, it's still being taken seriously.

It's astonishing. 

The irony of using "Hiroshima bomb" as a unit of measurement

People love to use informal "units of measurement" to describe the magnitude of things, like "football fields", "Mount Everest" (both for height and volume) and, of course, perhaps the most famous of them all, "Hiroshima bombs".

That pseudo-unit of measurement has become so ubiquitous and so normalized that some even just call it "Hiroshimas" (eg. in YouTube videos), even though that makes no sense.

There's a huge irony in using that bomb as a unit of measurement, though.

And what's that irony? Well, all these informal units are used to give people a good mental picture of the size of something. When you say that the area of something is "ten football fields", that gives a decent mental picture because most people have an understanding of how large a football field is. If you say "two olympic swimming pools (in volume)", most people have at least a ballpark mental picture of how large that is.

But what exactly is the mental picture of the energetic power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

The vast, vast majority of people have absolutely no idea. How big of an explosion was it? How much destruction did it cause? What was the blast radius? How far from the point of detonation did it cause significant damage to buildings?

The fact is that the vast, vast majority of people have absolutely no idea! Ask anybody any of those questions, and they will not know (some of them might throw wild guesses, but they will be just that, wild guesses and nothing more.)

That's because we don't have everyday experience with it, nor even have seen pretty much anything about it. There are some photos of the mushroom cloud (from which you can't even really see how large it is because there's no point of comparison), and stories about the destruction, but that's it. It's all extremely vague. 

So, quite ironically, this informal pseudo-unit of measurement, designed to give people a mental picture of the magnitude of something, is an extremely poor example of doing that. Even if you say "ten Hiroshima bombs" people will still have absolutely no idea how much that is. (Many people might get the impression that they do, but that's just an illusion. They actually don't, because they have no knowledge whatsoever about that magnitude, at any level. And usually they realize if they really start thinking about it.) 

That's quite different from something like "football field", where most people actually have some good mental picture of how large it is. 

The biggest mistake in Star Wars: Episode 1

When it comes to the prequel trilogy as a whole, the most fundamental problem was bad script writing by George Lucas and, most particularly, the fact that he completely missed the mark on the most important core plot of the entire trilogy. In other words, completely botching showing in a good and believable manner why and how Anakin switched to the dark side.

However, if we examine just the first movie, there are literally dozens of huge flaws in it that could have been done much, much better. However, by far the biggest mistake made in the movie, something that pretty much anybody would agree with, was killing off Darth Maul.

Ask pretty much anybody, and they will agree: By far and large, by a country mile, the most awesome, coolest and best element of the first movie was Darth Maul.

He is exactly what a believable threatening villain should be. He not only looks cool and menacing, but he doesn't speak, he doesn't banter, he doesn't taunt, he doesn't hesitate, he doesn't play with his enemies. Instead, he is efficient to the extreme, going for the kill as fast as possible, with extreme skill and precision.

His fight against the two Jedi is pretty much universally agreed to be the best laser saber fight in all of Star Wars. Not just the prequel trilogy, but all of it, every movie, every made-for-TV movie, every series.

He is so skilled and so dangerous that he single-handedly succeeded in defeating and killing one of the most powerful Jedi that existed in the lore, ie. Qui-Gon Jinn.

Then, after that feat, he is just ignominiously defeated by a padawan. It's no exaggeration that this was universally considered a complete disappointment.

What Lucas should have done is keep the fight exactly as it was (it's pretty much perfect), and after Maul killed Qui-Gon he has his short fight with Obi-Wan, who falls into the chute just like happens in the movie, but he doesn't come back up, he just falls all the way, Darth Maul looks him fall, and then walks away, as he has important things to do. (It would be a bit later in the movie shown that Obi-Wan survives the fall.)

This way Darth Maul could have returned in the second movie, and have a second fight with Obi-Wan, who would then have the opportunity to avenge his master's death properly. 

The main problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy

When the Star Wars prequel trilogy (ie. episodes 1 to 3) were announced, it caused an absolutely massive amount of hype because it had been 16 years since the last mainline Star Wars movie, and fans were absolutely excited. The theatrical release of the first movie in the trilogy broke world records in the amount of people lining up to movie theaters and, especially, in the amount of time they did so: Indeed, at many places people were camping in line for literally weeks in advance. (Lining up for the premiere of a hyped movie for an unreasonable amount of time was not unheard of, but this broke all previous records by a landslide.)

Then the first movie came out and... to say that it caused mixed feelings is understating it. For many fans the absolutely massive hype did carry on for quite a while and they were still excited about the movie for months to come... but even they started to experience a bit of doubt once the hype had passed and they could analyze the movie in a more level-headed manner, particularly after re-watching it a couple of times more.

Some fans were somewhat disappointed from the get-go, others became a bit disappointed in retrospect after the initial hype had passed, but most of them were still defending the movie and hoping and expecting that the next two movies in the trilogy would make up for the disappointment and be awesome. Sure, a few fans were still saying that the movie was a masterpiece, but they were in somewhat of a minority.

Then the second movie came out, a lot of people once again lined up for the premiere (although in somewhat lesser numbers and less time than for the first one) and the hype was really high once again, and after seeing the movie... once again mixed feelings. Some loved it, some were a bit disappointed, although most of them couldn't really put their finger on why exactly.

For most fans hope was still not lost: Surely the third movie, the "finale", would redeem the entire trilogy, and save it from disgrace? Yet, the exact same story repeated a third time: Long queues (but not as long as for the first movie), a lot of hype and excitement, lots of mixed feelings after seeing the movie.

The entire trilogy got a huge amount of backlash and criticism starting from the very first one, and even the most avid fans couldn't defend it very strongly. Some fans were still clinging to it and saying that it was a good trilogy and they liked it, but the general consensus, even among avid fans, was that it was "ok but a bit of a disappointment." Very mixed feelings. Among less-of-an-avid-fan viewers the general sentiment was a lot more negative, and many outright hated the entire trilogy, and particularly the first movie.

There is an enormous amount of criticism, even very rational and reasonable criticism, that can be given for the trilogy, but almost all of it can be summarized by one single thing: George Lucas is a bad writer.

That might sound like sacrilege, but that was indeed the crux of the problem. He wrote bad scripts for all three movies. He should have really left the scripts to better writers and concentrated only on producing and directing the trilogy. He could have delineated the stories, but the details should have been left to world-class scriptwriters.

Anyway, that's not the "main problem" I'm not referring to in the title of this post. Of course it stems from the bad writing, but from all the problems in the script (and the movies in general), what is the one that could be considered the most fundamental?

Well, what is the core idea of the prequel trilogy? What is it about?

The prequel trilogy is the origin story of Darth Vader. That's what.

This is not just speculation or reading between the lines: It's directly the official canon. And, rather obviously, it can be seen in the movies: The main running plot and idea is how Anakin Skywalker became a Jedi knight and then joined the Sith, becoming Darth Vader. We follow his story from childhood, when he was first discovered by the Jedi Order, all the way up to him becoming Darth Vader at the end.

And the main and most fundamental problem with the entire trilogy is: This background story and particularly his turn to the dark side and joining the Sith is extremely badly written.

For starters, the total running time of the entire trilogy is about 8 hours. I have not gone through the trouble of accurately counting how much of those 8 hours is dedicated to showing Anakin's slow transformation and reasoning for his turning, but I would estimate that, at the very most, about 15 minutes is dedicated to it.

That's astonishingly little time dedicated to the very core plot and idea of the trilogy.

And, indeed, when you watch the trilogy for the first time, even knowing that this is the core idea, his turning to the dark side and joining the Sith comes a bit out of the blue, without much explanation, without much reason. There's extremely little in the trilogy that explains what happened and why he did it, how his thinking changed and what lured him. There are a few scattered scenes here and there, but they are very short and not very telling, and most of them are very simplistic, even childish.

This is the main problem with Lucas' bad writing: He spent way, way too little time showing Anakin's psychological transformation, and even the little that he did show was badly written, making his turning feel like unjustified, unexplained and random. It almost feels like Lucas himself couldn't figure out why Anakin turned to the dark side, or couldn't figure out how to explain it, and he struggled to insert at least a few scenes trying to show something about it. 

I don't understand why Ramanujan summation is taken seriously

One of the most (in)famous "proofs" that the sum of all natural numbers is -1/12 uses as one of its steps a so-called Ramanujan summation to declare that the the infinite sum

1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + ... = 1/2

I don't see anything that would justify this equality. The infinite sum is divergent, ie. it does not converge to any particular value no matter how far you advance in it. There is no justification to assigning the arbitrary value 1/2 to it. (There is no justification to just declare that the result of the entire sum is the average of two consecutive partial results. There's even less justification for it because what you get as partial results depends on how you group the terms.)

How this kind of thing should normally be handled is like this:

1) Hypothesis: The infinite sum 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + ... = 1/2

2) Counter-proof: We assume that the hypothesis is true and show that it leads to a contradiction. Namely: The assumption leads to the contradictory statement that the sum of all natural numbers, which is divergent, is a particular finite value, which would imply the sum would be convergent. An infinite sum cannot be both divergent and convergent at the same time, thus it's a mathematical contradiction.

3) Thus: The hypothesis cannot be true.

In general, whenever a statement leads to a contradiction, it proves that the statement is false. In this case, we have proven by contradiction the Ramanujan summation as incorrect.

But rather than declaring said summation as incorrect (because it leads to a contradictory result), instead mathematicians have taken it as correct and subsequently also the nonsensical statement that results from it.

It's incomprehensible.