Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: Top 5 Most Surprisingly Good NPCs
RPGs are awash with NPCs (non-player characters) to fill out the worlds. Some of them are random people you come across just wondering the streets, some are sitting in bars, and some of them are ones you regularly have to work with. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has no shortage of characters but some of them clearly outshine the others to a surprising degree. Here are my 5 favorites.
For an RPG (role-playing game) to fully immerse someone into its world, the focus isn't just on the main, playable characters. A lot of immersion comes down to the regular joes that make up the world, the NPCs or non-playable characters. These people show you that the world exists outside just your small group of misfits. And Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a ton of them and while many of them are your standard people walking from point A to point B, some of the ones you interact with are just exceptional in the work put in.
Here's my top 5 favorite, in order. Please, be mindful that this article is buried in spoilers so beware.
Chadley
That's right, I said it. Chadley is a great NPC. Sure, he's a weird dork, but he's learning. This weird android was introduced to us in FF7Remake as the occasional pop-up quest giver who specialized in granting summon Materia and fun little side quests.
In Rebirth, however, Chadley has a much bigger role to play. Having broken away from his Shinra overlords, he is now free to run about as he sees fit, and has even built himself a buddy in the form of Mia (who I like to think is named after the ferret in Crystal Bearers). Now Chadley has set off on his own in order to fully discover the world on his own terms.
Chadley still facilitates a similar role like his one in Remake except now it's a lot more entertaining than just randomly finding him standing around in a town, he has now given you a multi-tool that doubles as a video phone. Something he uses a LOT on your journey, especially if you're going to be exploring that sweet, sweet open world.
Chadley gives you a slew of tasks and everything serves a bigger benefit in the long run. For example, Chadley makes a materia available in one of his early encounters that allows you to pull off special moves that you take from enemies, similar to the old Blue Mage abilities if you're old enough to remember those bad boys. Studying rare monsters creates new sims from Chadley. Completing those sims adds new attacks to your materia creating a slew of neat options. Sure, you can have Yuffie throw a throwing star but that's boring when compared to 1,000 Needles.
Chadley now gives you a compelling reason to explore the open world and, though he can be really annoying, especially when he abuses your controller's built in speaker in the middle of the night to put the fear of god into you while you're playing.