Quirky merchant characters peddling their goods are nothing new to videogames, and Final Fantasy XIII-2 has its own such merchant as well. This morning, Square showed first screenshots of Chocolina (above), a travelling merchant who will sell you items, weapons, accessories, monster training items, and bargains. Here are some of the things you can buy from her shop:

You can look at more screenshots of the game below, including some of the Archylte Steppe, a new area in the game. There’s also screens of Noel and Serah’s meeting, some of the dialogue choices during their conversations (called Live Trigger events), and cutscenes from other events.

I got to say FF13 looked visually better than this game. No wonder the preorders are so low in Japan.

Lets hope the items you buy are customisable before you finish the game this time.

Oh sweet Jesus those screenshots look great. From the looks of the trailers I thought I was going to be disappointed by the environments, guess I was wrong.

As for the graphics which dsage commented on, I also think FFXIII looked better but only in the pre-rendered cutscenes, gameplay looks the same if not better, although some of those screenshots did look pretty bad, especially the low res textures and models on Caius' sword.

could have been better

You already know she'll have an annoying voice.

dialogue choices?

She's not half naked enough!

Wow, the grass looks pretty bad.

But the "Chocolina"...

All and all, things are looking great.