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[Can this be classified as news? I am not sure tbh, but I did think it was quite interesting thus the reason I posted this here, instead @ General Round Up]
Final Fantasy XIII-2's Chocolina and the Mystery of the Omniscient Merchant
(PS3, XBOX 360)
The strangest new addition to FFXIII-2 upholds a curious legacy.
By 1UP Staff 01/20/2012
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.
Click the image above to check out all Final Fantasy XIII-2 screens.
Chocolina seems to be intimately familiar with nature of the heroes' quest, occasionally reminding them that everyone is counting on them. Her basic entry reads, "Chocolina is a time-traveling merchant who can be found all over the world. There are reports of this mysterious trader appearing in almost every age in history. Some rumors say that she is a certain creature that took on human form?" And if you read between the lines of an out-of-the-way codec entry, you can find an implication regarding her true identity that just makes the whole thing even weirder.
Whether deliberate or not, developers Square Enix and tri-Ace have tapped into a grand video game tradition with this almost-but-not-quite-sexy time traveler: The omniscient, omnipresent merchant. Sometime in the past decade, game developers (and very specifically Japanese developers) seem to have latched on to the narrative contrivance of giving in-game sales people a dual purpose as vendors and mouthpieces. Certainly games are suffering from no shortage of your standard merchants, the generic non-player characters standing perpetually behind a shop counter offering the same player-level-appropriate wares until the bitter end, but the omniscient merchant is increasingly popular. Chocolina is the second in less than six months, in fact!
These uncanny salespeople make sense from both a narrative and mechanical perspective. The player always has need of goods, whether weapons or consumables, and any game with an economy will feature shops or merchants at key points along the course of the adventure. By assigning a personality to a standard gameplay function, developers add another memorable character to their cast without having to integrate another ally or enemy into the story. And by tapping into the concept of the supernatural, writers suddenly have a new mouthpiece for supplementary exposition that doesn't quite fit into the framework of the main plot. In effect, these merchants become their respective games' Greek chorus, offering information and commentary outside the bounds of the normal plot. And most of the time, we players simply roll with it, because they're connected to a contrivance of game design (being able to exchange universal currency for ever-increasing power regardless of the ever-more harrowing setting).
Click the image above to check out all Final Fantasy XIII-2 screens.
In that sense, Chocolina belongs to quite the distinguished fraternity:
Source - http://www.1up.com/previews/final-fantasy-xiii-2-chocolina-mystery-merchant
Final Fantasy XIII-2's Chocolina and the Mystery of the Omniscient Merchant
(PS3, XBOX 360)
The strangest new addition to FFXIII-2 upholds a curious legacy.
By 1UP Staff 01/20/2012
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.
Chocolina seems to be intimately familiar with nature of the heroes' quest, occasionally reminding them that everyone is counting on them. Her basic entry reads, "Chocolina is a time-traveling merchant who can be found all over the world. There are reports of this mysterious trader appearing in almost every age in history. Some rumors say that she is a certain creature that took on human form?" And if you read between the lines of an out-of-the-way codec entry, you can find an implication regarding her true identity that just makes the whole thing even weirder.
Whether deliberate or not, developers Square Enix and tri-Ace have tapped into a grand video game tradition with this almost-but-not-quite-sexy time traveler: The omniscient, omnipresent merchant. Sometime in the past decade, game developers (and very specifically Japanese developers) seem to have latched on to the narrative contrivance of giving in-game sales people a dual purpose as vendors and mouthpieces. Certainly games are suffering from no shortage of your standard merchants, the generic non-player characters standing perpetually behind a shop counter offering the same player-level-appropriate wares until the bitter end, but the omniscient merchant is increasingly popular. Chocolina is the second in less than six months, in fact!
These uncanny salespeople make sense from both a narrative and mechanical perspective. The player always has need of goods, whether weapons or consumables, and any game with an economy will feature shops or merchants at key points along the course of the adventure. By assigning a personality to a standard gameplay function, developers add another memorable character to their cast without having to integrate another ally or enemy into the story. And by tapping into the concept of the supernatural, writers suddenly have a new mouthpiece for supplementary exposition that doesn't quite fit into the framework of the main plot. In effect, these merchants become their respective games' Greek chorus, offering information and commentary outside the bounds of the normal plot. And most of the time, we players simply roll with it, because they're connected to a contrivance of game design (being able to exchange universal currency for ever-increasing power regardless of the ever-more harrowing setting).
In that sense, Chocolina belongs to quite the distinguished fraternity:
Source - http://www.1up.com/previews/final-fantasy-xiii-2-chocolina-mystery-merchant
I wish I could get the game but I doubt I'll have the money anytime soon
