Chadley is basically a main character in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

Final Fantasy 7 and its compilation media has featured some of my favorite video game characters. There’s Cloud Strife, the emotionally reserved but endlessly awkward guy who just wants to be cool. His childhood friend, a grumpy-looking Tifa, brings a sense of kindness and warmth to the worst of situations. Hell, even the villains are charming in their own way. I don’t want to be your average Shinra lapdog, but maybe I’d be one for Rufus, whose innovative sense of style somehow makes me forget that he’s the CEO of an evil company.

Then there’s Chadley, an unfortunate character whose design looks like something out of 9S Nier: Automata with a boy scout.

Chadley made his series debut in Final Fantasy 7 Remake when he recruited Cloud to gather combat intelligence by taking on virtual combat challenges. How we learned New editionChadley is a humanoid robot created by Shinra’s Professor Hojo. Despite working for this evil and cruel scientist, Chadley seemed harmless enough and Cloud was actually able to help free him from Hojo’s programming near the end New editionand transforms him into a completely independent being. Now he’s back Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and ready to support the cause of Cloud and Avalanche.

In New edition, Chadley was a perfectly suitable character to talk to every now and then. Cloud could talk to him when he needed to, but now he plays a pretty big role in the larger world and gameplay Rebirth. At the start of the game, he tasks Cloud with surveying each region by visiting different geographical locations – such as a special spring or a cave dedicated to an incantation – and scanning them with a device to collect data. Since exploring each region and points is a large part of the game, this forces players to interact with Chadley and listen to his boring chatter frequently.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

The scanning device Chadley gives to Cloud doubles as a communication device, allowing him to call Cloud at any time. Chadley doesn’t talk every time Cloud scans a new location, but he does chatter about all sorts of random findings. When Cloud breaks a stone to find a Summon Sanctuary, he gives you background information on a god’s mythology. When Cloud scans a life source or tower, he may be talking about local regional phenomena. He often comes by and brings basic facts about the region and then gets out again. And his excited, pubescent voice doesn’t hold up over long stretches.

Chadley acts as a living encyclopedia, but his chatter isn’t particularly helpful. Something I really appreciated New edition This is how the developers showed us the way the world works. Smaller tasks, such as walking to another neighborhood, required additional tasks to secure documents such as ID cards and helped provide a sense of Shrina’s tight grip on the city. We got to know the city through the feel of the game and the stories of the characters. Now Chadley is just used to throw a bunch of decontextualized lore into a huge world. Sure, it’ll be great fodder for fan-run wiki pages in the future, but it’s not a compelling way to show us the larger world.

Luckily, there is at least one way to lower Chadley’s overall level in the game. The young scholar speaks largely through the PlayStation 5 controller’s built-in speaker, which you can mute in the game’s settings. Unfortunately, this just means he’s talking through the screen, but it at least minimizes any possible jump scares from Chadley through the controller.

Overall, Chadley comes across as an annoying confidant who wasn’t needed at all. The game has many other, more interesting characters. Personally, I would be more interested in learning more about what Red is. Although I appreciate learning more about the larger world, I think I would be better off without him.