Dragon’s Dogma 2 & FF7 Rebirth fighting for “Most Annoying Characters” of 2024

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Dragon’s Dogma 2 are strong candidates for GOTY 2024, but they’re also battling in a much more unpleasant category. 

Some of the best video games of all time can be let down by annoying characters. Baby Mario in Yoshi’s Island, Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Natalya from GoldenEye 007, for example, will live forever in the minds of fans due to how unpleasant they are. 

Many of the most annoying video game characters come from a time when developers weren’t as clued into what the audience wanted. It’s much rarer to see annoying characters like that in modern games, especially in an era where the fanbase can communicate with developers directly on social media. 

Who’d make a character like Navi in 2024? Someone who badly wants millions of Tweets calling them the scum on the Earth. 

Unfortunately, it seems that Capcom and Square Enix have forgotten the lessons of older titles, as two of the best games of the year are also saddled with the most annoying characters of 2024(so far). 

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s pawns will make you want to jump into a monster’s maw

Dexerto/Capcom

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, you get to make a pawn (a computer-controlled character who is with you throughout the game) and can hire two additional pawns designed by other players, giving you a party of four. 

The problem with hiring so many pawns as they NEVER SHUT UP! They constantly comment on everything that’s going on, be it things happening in the battle, what their previous master was like, how they feel about recent quests, and even whenever they spot useful items on the overworld. 

It’s not even that the pawns have bad things to say — sometimes, they can lead you to something you haven’t seen before. It’s that they pester you constantly with their observations at every juncture. 

You can try playing the game without pawns, but that ups the difficulty considerably. Having pawns that the enemy can target instead of your protagonist will help your survivability in the long run, as will having pawn spellcasters casting healing spells. 

Now, there are options for muting the pawns, but that doesn’t stop their subtitles from appearing, and the only way to get rid of them is to shut off subtitles entirety, which means players who require text to play the game are out of luck. 

Capcom has promised QoL updates for Dragon’s Dogma 2, including the ability to start a new save file, but there’s no mention of adjusting the pawn’s dialogue. Hopefully, players will make their voices heard, and options to reduce or remove pawn text will be included in a patch.

Chadley & MAI from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth ruin most of the battle with inane chatter

Square Enix

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a highly acclaimed game that is said to do justice to the classic story of the original. The game has done something even more impressive than update the story of Final Fantasy VII, however. 

You see, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth introduced characters more annoying than Cait Sith. 

Cait Sith is actually endearing in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. He’s tied into the story better than he is in Final Fantasy VII; his awful dialogue from Advent Children is gone, and the terrible stealth mission from Dirge of Cerberus is nowhere to be seen.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth also helped Cait Sith’s case by inflicting Chadely and MAI on the party. These two characters will never shut up during most of the game’s sidequests, as they will squawk at you constantly through the DualSense’s speaker.

Chadley debuted in Final Fantasy VII Remake as a loveable young scientist who helped the members of Avalanche with his discoveries. In Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, he becomes a primary quest giver, as well as a primary quest ‘talker over.’

MAI is a new character in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. She’s an AI created by Chadley, who also feels the need to comment on all of your quests.

See, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has many missions where you fight monsters, learn the history of the summon monsters, and explore the game’s world in ways you couldn’t in the original.

Unfortunately, these missions have a running commentary, as Chadley and MAI will talk over most of them, adding additional context where none was needed. Even worse, they’ll talk over gameplay segments, distracting the player while they’re completing tasks. 

There is a way to mute Chadley & MAI’s audio, but it involves turning off the speaker in your DualSense, which means switching it off and on whenever you want to play another game. 

Like Dragon’s Dogma 2, there’s no word regarding an update for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that will let you quieten the scientific duo, though we hope that the developers prioritize it. 

Who is worse: the pawns or Chadley & MAI?

Dexerto

In my opinion, the pawns are the more annoying characters, as they talk all the time. You can at least pause the gameplay and wait for Chadley & MAI to shut up before attempting quests, and turning off the DualSense speaker isn’t the worst option in the world. 

I can see where the developers were going for with these characters. The pawns make the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 feel more alive, while Chadley & MAI offer lore dumps about aspects of Final Fantasy VII’s world that fans from twenty years ago could only dream of.

It’s just the execution that was flawed, which means that people who enjoyed these games at launch had to endure frustrating characters whose speech could easily have been a QoL option that players could use/disable at their leisure.