🎮 “Only 2% of players have earned the rarest FF7 Rebirth trophy, and the reason could not be more OBVIOUS!”
If you’re still trying to unlock that elusive FF7 Rebirth trophy, you’re not alone. Only 2% of players have earned it, and after learning the reason, it all makes sense.

The challenge? Extreme difficulty and a hidden secret that most players are overlooking. Here’s why so few have been able to achieve it!

An incredibly small percentage of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth players have earned this surprisingly rare trophy, but there may be a good reason for that. The staggering amount of content available in FF7 Rebirth has been discussed to death: many players found it overwhelming and, at times, distracting, while others loved the silly mini-games and sunk hours into Queen’s Blood. For the record, I find myself somewhere between the two camps – although the game’s sheer scale has made it incredibly difficult to 100%. There are all kinds of obscure trophies hidden all throughout the game.

But weirdly enough, the rarest FF7 Rebirth trophies have nothing to do with obscure mini-games, or hidden objects in far-off locations, or extended exploration – they’re all about combat. Beating the entire game on Hard mode, getting to 300% damage on a staggered enemy, or simply getting all the different weapon skills and limit breaks: these are apparently some of the hardest tasks in the game, if you trust the low percentage of PS5 players who have completed them. But the hardest achievement at all is also combat-related, and while its difficulty certainly plays a role in its rarity, it’s not the only factor.

“Virtually Renowned” Is The Hardest-To-Get FF7 Rebirth Trophy

Beat All Combat Simulations

A moogle rides a chocobo into battle in FF7 Rebirth’s Combat Simulator.

The rarest FF7 Rebirth achievement, earned by just 2.5% of players on PS5, is “Virtually Renowned,” which requires you to beat every single boss in Chadley’s combat simulator. This is a difficult enough achievement on its face: the combat simulator battles are difficult by design.

That’s not always because you’re fighting a difficult enemy (although that often is the case). Lots of combat simulator battles have unique unlock conditions that you’ll have to satisfy before even attempting to take them on. And some of them require you to play as a solo character, which can make simple battles feel insurmountable.

The combat simulator isn’t just for fun – beating these optional battles often rewards you with powerful or rare Materia.

And, to make matters worse, there are the Brutal and Legendary challenges. Unlocked once you complete all the Protorelic challenges in the game and the main story, respectively – themselves impressive and time-consuming feats – these are some of the toughest fights in the game by far. You’ll need to customize your character builds to each one, with the perfect combination of weapons, accessories, and Materia, to even stand a chance.

Chadley’s Combat Simulations In FF7 Rebirth Are Notorious At This Point

“Hello Cloud!”

Beyond their difficulty, though, which is undeniably a factor in why only 2.5% of players have earned these achievements, there’s also the simple fact that many players are annoyed by Rebirth‘s combat simulator quests. They’re really a distraction from the things that really matter about the game: the story, the characters, the world, et cetera. And you have to devote a lot of time to succeeding in them, but since the rewards are so useful, they’re kind of unavoidable.

And besides that, many players find Chadley himself – the quest giver of all these combat simulator fights – at least a little annoying. He’s got that kind of earnestly precocious wunderkind personality that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Although I find him tolerable for the most part, I do acknowledge that he can drone on a little too long sometimes.

Therein really lies the problem: there’s nothing inherently wrong with Chadley as a character, although some players would have you believe as much. The issue, for me, is that FF7 Rebirth devotes an inordinate amount of screen time to a character whose presence is essentially meaningless.

Chadley is emblematic of FF7 Rebirth’s pervasive sidequest bloat.

The amount of talking Chadley does is entirely disproportionate to the size of his role in the greater story of FF7. He barely develops, he has little to do with the game’s overall themes, and even the lore dumps he provides are better off unspoken, or at least relegated to an in-game codex that players can read at their leisure. As the quest giver of its least interesting and most time-consuming tasks, Chadley is emblematic of FF7 Rebirth‘s pervasive sidequest bloat.

But Chadley rant aside, many players refuse to engage with the combat simulator tasks because of how difficult and distracting they can be. For these reasons, the “Virtually Renowned” achievement is the rarest among PS5 players of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and will likely remain that way for a long time to come.