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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3. Lifesprings

What are they? These are blessedly simple: You see a bird, you follow a bird, you do a very simple set of three “timed” button presses while a pretty song plays. Fin!How often do you have to do it? There are usually four or five Lifesprings per area; you’ll want to do them, too, both because they’re full of occasionally useful crafting materials, and because the game hides some of the other (generally more enjoyable) chores on this list behind completing them. How much of a pain in the ass is it? It’s saying something that the third-placed entry on this big ranking of Rebirth’s chores earns its location on the basis of being strictly benign. Lifesprings are, essentially, the Minimum Possible Unit Of Game: Five minutes of walking, 10 seconds of button pressing, absolutely zero thought. If they only made you press the button twice (or, dare we say it, once), they’d be even better, but as is, they’re a pretty good way to get to hear Rebirth’s interpretation of the main theme from Final Fantasy VII, and not much else.