Splatoon 2’s Squid Form, Explained for Collectors

Furuta Choco Egg Splatoon 2 Neon Pink Inkling Squid Figure

Nintendo’s Ink-Shooting Franchise and the Inkling Squid Form

Splatoon is Nintendo’s original action-shooter IP, built around teams competing to cover an arena with colored ink rather than eliminating opponents. The first game launched on Wii U in 2015; Splatoon 2 followed on Nintendo Switch on July 21, 2017 in Japan and went on to sell more than 13 million copies worldwide by 2023, making it one of the standout titles in the Switch’s early library.

The Inklings are Splatoon’s central playable species. They can shift freely between a humanoid form and a squid form, and that shift is not just cosmetic: diving into your team’s ink as a squid refills your ink tank and lets you move rapidly across the arena. The squid form is the backbone of how the game feels to play, which is why it registers as a franchise symbol on the same level as any gear-wearing Inkling pose.

This figure captures an Inkling in squid form in Neon Pink — one of the player-selectable ink colors in Splatoon 2. In the game’s design, a player’s chosen ink color carries over to their squid form, so the coloring is a direct expression of in-game identity rather than an arbitrary merchandise choice. Among officially licensed Splatoon products, the squid form on its own appears considerably less often than the humanoid Inkling, making this a less common angle on the IP — one grounded in the game’s mechanics rather than its character design.

Furuta’s Choco Egg and Japan’s Food Toy Tradition

The figure is part of the Choco Egg line produced by Furuta Confectionery Co., Ltd., an Osaka-based Japanese candy company. Since 1999, Furuta has packaged small licensed figures inside chocolate eggs: you purchase an egg, open it, and find a plastic capsule containing one figure from the current series. The contents are a surprise — multiple figures exist within each release, and completing a full set drives the collecting behavior the format is designed around. Furuta has produced Choco Egg series for several Nintendo properties, including Super Mario and Animal Crossing alongside Splatoon.

This category of product is known in Japan as shokugan — literally “food toy” — referring to collectibles bundled with candy and sold through ordinary retail channels: convenience stores, supermarkets, and toy shops. It sits alongside gachapon capsule machines as one of Japan’s distinctive systems for distributing small licensed figures at scale. The Splatoon 2 Choco Egg series was produced around 2017 to 2018, timed to the game’s domestic launch and its peak popularity period. As an officially licensed product, the design follows Nintendo’s character specifications. The figure stands on a small round black base attached via a thin support rod — the standard display format for the Choco Egg line.

Choco Egg products were sold exclusively through Japanese domestic retail and were never distributed to overseas stores through normal channels. Outside Japan, access has depended on import specialty shops or individual sellers, which means international Splatoon fans could not have found this on a local shelf. That holds for the shokugan category broadly: it is a format that grew out of Japan’s specific retail infrastructure and has no direct equivalent elsewhere.