Let’s rank all the chores in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth by how much of a pain in the butt they are

As players who’ve spent the last weekend burning their way through it already know, there are an enormous number of things to love about the just-released Final Fantasy VII Rebirth—mostly because there an enormous number of things, period, in the second installment of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII remake project. If we’re lobbing accusations, though, we can’t help but notice that the people of Gaia do seem kind of, well, lazy at times—having a pronounced tendency to ask heroic mercenary Cloud Strife and his party of freedom fighters to do their entire chore list for them for basically no pay, even as he’s a tad busy trying to deal with the twin planet-destroying threats of angelic rival Sephiroth and the Shinra Electric Power Company.

The worst of these taskmasters, of course, is Chadley—the pre-teen mega-nerd who follows Cloud and his friends from town to town, asking them to play video games for him while tasking them with filling out a gigantic checklist of chores in each of the game’s massive open-world map segments. In essence, Chadley is the living personification of Rebirth’s somewhat surprising turn toward Ubisoft-style “map game,” with most of his “world intel” requests forcing you to traverse giant sections of territory, moving from map icon to map icon, and doing the same small grouping of repetitive tasks over and over again. We don’t have exact numbers, but filling out Chadley’s Cloud-do list took up at least a quarter of our 90 or so hours with the game—making Rebirth, for all its good points, a game that’s at least 25 percent chore, by volume.

It’s impossible, over that long a period, not to form some decidedly strong opinions about the qualities of the tasks being set—not all of which are created equal, even on the already curved scale of irritating, repetitive tasks. Which is why, now that the rest of the world has had some time with the game, we’ve put together just such a ranking: Rating all the irritating chores of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, from worst to best, based on how much frustration (or, in a couple of cases, genuine joy) they provoked for us. Please note that this ranking only encompasses Rebirth’s open-world exploration tasks—and thus does not include any of the following other chore-like tasks you may encounter during your time with the game:

Card battles, piano playing, simulator fights, arena fights, the other arena fights, the pirate-shooting minigame, box-smashing, dolphin racing, frog leaping, treasure hunting, chocobo racing, grass collecting, 3D battling, motorcycle fighting, either dance minigame, sit-up contests, spaceship fighting, dog-based Rocket League, minecart riding, or any of the dozen or so other chore-like tasks Final Fantasy VII Rebirth asks you to do to distract you from the fact you’re playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

(If we were ranking them, the sit-up contests would come last.)

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10. Chocobo hunting

What is it? You know how nearly every video game developer, at some point in their careers, falls prey to the delusion that their otherwise non-stealth-based video game needs an extended, highly punishing stealth sequence or two? It’s a distressingly common psychosis, presumably brought on by a combination of overwork, underpay, and too much Metal Gear. Now imagine you had to do one such sequence, of increasingly irritating complexity, nearly every time you entered a new region of FFVII Rebirth, in order to get access to the highly mobile birds/franchise mascots that serve as your absolutely mandatory mounts in each area. Have fun!How often do you have to do it? Even the designers at Square-Enix seem to have understood that slooowly sneaking up on birds with unpredictable vision cones and annoying puzzles attached to them was something they could only ask of players a handful of times—even the game lets you off the hook in a couple of its 6 open-world regions, letting you rent chocobos instead of catching them wild. God bless capitalism.How much of a pain in the ass is it to do? Unimaginably. Rebirth has an occasional problem with making players move very slowly for no damn reason anyway, mostly involving dragging crates, dumpsters, and machinery around. (Also: Extended post-traumatic stress sequences.) The Chocobo stealth sequences incorporate all those mechanics alongside the whole stealth game “get caught, do it again!” routine that’s part of why this trend is such an enormous pain in the ass, coming together in a perfect storm of irritation. (There are checkpoints mid-mission, mercifully, but it’s not enough.) It’s the worst parts of the game, the worst parts of open-world tedium, the worst parts of everything. Interminable.