Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is basically a Chadley simulator

polygon.com:

Final Fantasy 7 and its compilation media have introduced some of my favorite video game characters. There’s Cloud Strife, the emotionally cagey but endlessly awkward dude who just wants to be cool. His childhood friend, a sullen-eyed Tifa, brings a sense of kindness and warmth to the most dire of situations. Hell, even the villains are charming in their own ways. I wouldn’t want to be a generic Shinra lapdog, but maybe I’d go and be one for Rufus, whose cutting-edge sense of style somehow makes me forget he’s the CEO of an evil company.

Then there’s Chadley, an unfortunate character whose design looks like if you combined 9S from Nier: Automata with a Boy Scout.

Chadley made his series debut in Final Fantasy 7 Remake when he recruited Cloud to collect battle intel by undertaking virtual fighting challenges. As we learned in Remake, Chadley is a humanoid robot created by Shinra’s Professor Hojo. Although he worked for that evil and cruel scientist, Chadley seemed harmless enough and Cloud could actually help free him from Hojo’s programming toward the end of Remake, turning him into a fully independent being. Now, he’s back in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and ready to help Cloud and Avalanche’s cause.

In Remake, Chadley served as a perfectly adequate character to talk to every now and again. Cloud could talk to him when he needed to, but he now plays a pretty big role in the larger world and gameplay in Rebirth. Toward the beginning of the game, he tasks Cloud with surveying each region by visiting different geographic locations — like a special spring or a cave dedicated to a summon — and scanning them with a device to collect data. Given that exploring each region and all the points forms a major part of the game, this forces players to interact with Chadley and hear his boring chatter frequently.

The scanning device Chadley gives Cloud doubles as a communications device that he can call Cloud up on at any moment. Chadley doesn’t talk every single time Cloud scans a