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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2. Buried treasure

What is it? A chocobo-assisted treasure hunt. Go to a marked location on the world map, sniff around, follow glowing trails to dig up a series of fairly useful items.How often do you have to do it? To be honest, if y0u were required to perform this particular task more often, it’d probably be ranked lower; as-is, you’re doing it a maximum of twice per region, and it can actually be pretty fun to hunt down the various upgrade plans and occasional quest items that are hidden in a series of interesting-looking ruins. How much of a pain in the ass is it? Mild! We would argue that, if you have a magical bird that can sniff out buried treasure, it doesn’t make sense for those mystical stink lines to be blocked by walls, forcing you to sniff again once you get around the obstruction. But these are quibbles! We’re not here to quibble, we’re here to chore, and these are pretty painless as far as chores go.