Final fantasy 7 and its compilation media introduced 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 gruff-looking Tifa, brings a sense of kindness and warmth to the most dire situations. Even the villains are charming in their own way. I wouldn’t want to be a generic Shinra lapdog, but I might become one for Rufus, whose progressive sense of style somehow makes me forget that he’s the CEO of an evil corporation.
Then there’s Chadley, an unfortunate character whose design looks like when you combine 9S Nier: Automata with a boy scout.
Chadley made his series debut in Final Fantasy 7 Remake when he recruited Cloud to gather battle intelligence by completing virtual battle challenges. As we have learned RemakeChadley is a humanoid robot created by Shinra’s Professor Hojo. Even though he worked for that evil and cruel scientist, Chadley seemed harmless enough and Cloud was actually able to help free him from Hojo’s programming by the end of the movie. Remake, making him a completely independent being. Now he’s back in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and ready to help Cloud and Avalanche’s cause.
In Remake, Chadley was a perfectly suited character to talk to every now and then. Cloud could talk to him when needed, but he now plays a pretty big role in the larger world and gameplay Rebirth. Near the start of the game, he tasks Cloud with investigating each region by visiting different geographic locations – such as a special spring or a cave dedicated to a summon – and scanning them with a data-gathering device. Since exploring each region and all points is an important part of the game, this forces players to interact with Chadley and hear his boring chatter on a regular basis.
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
The scanning device that Chadley gives to Cloud also acts as a communication device that allows him to summon Cloud at any time. Chadley doesn’t talk every time Cloud scans a new location, but he chats on about all kinds of random knowledge. When Cloud cuts through a rock to find a Summon Sanctuary, he gives you background information on a god’s mythology. When Cloud scans a Source of Life or a tower, he can talk about any local regional phenomena. He regularly drops by with basic facts about the region, and then disappears again. And his excited, adolescent voice doesn’t last long.
Chadley functions as a living encyclopedia, but his chatter doesn’t really help. Something I appreciated Remake was how the developers showed us the way of the world. Small tasks like moving to a different neighborhood required additional quests to secure documents such as identity cards and helped give a sense of Shrina’s tight grip on the city. We got to know the city through what it felt like to play and the characters’ stories. Now Chadley is just being used as a way to dump a bunch of decontextualized knowledge into a giant 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.
Fortunately, there is at least one thing you can do to lower the overall Chadley levels in the game. The young scholar talks mostly through the built-in speaker on the PlayStation 5 controller, and you can mute it in the game settings. Unfortunately, this only means he’s talking through the screen, but at least it minimizes any Chadley jump scares from the controller.
Overall, Chadley comes across as the annoying familiar who was never needed in the first place. The game has plenty of other, more interesting characters. Personally, I’d be more interested in learning more about what Red So while I appreciate learning more about the larger world, I think I’m better off without him.