If you’ve played the demo for Final Fantasy XIII-2, currently available on both PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, that means you’ve discovered the single strangest thing about the game: Chocolina, the roaming arms dealer. At first glance Chocolina is simply a woman rather inappropriately clad in a skimpy chocobo costume; she appears to be a Carnivale dancer hanging out in an archaeological excavation for no clearly explained reason. But explore further into the Bresha Ruins and there she is again… and again. Always near at hand, always ready to make a deal, and always talking a mile a minute like some sort of meth tweaker.
According to an interview at SPoNG, producer Yoshinori Kitase has explained Chocolina as a design for a waitress that director Motomu Toriyama liked so much they gave her a more prominent role in the game. Indeed, eventually you’ll meet several more women dressed in outfits exactly like Chocolina’s but in different colors. And that could easily be that — just a much-needed and thematically appropriate random injection of wackiness into an RPG that otherwise takes itself very, very seriously — yet it’s possible to divine more than that if you pay attention to Chocolina’s machine-gun patter and read through the game’s datalog entries.
