#Elden Ring is right there and is a much friendlier place to learn whatever I'd need to actually play through Dark Souls

[miirshroom]

The Dark Souls Pendant

A simple pendant with no effect. Even so, pleasant memories are crucial to survival on arduous journeys.

I have been looking up the 12 year old discourse over the Dark Souls Pendant item.

People like to bring it up as an example of Miyazaki "trolling" by saying he'd pick a useless item as a starting gift. With evidence being in a later interview saying that was "a bit of an intention to play a prank". I agree that there is a prank happening here, but it took all of 15 minutes for me to read a few wiki pages and think of at least four reasons why Miyazaki would pick the pendant as a starting gift. So. I will go through them.

1) Questline Importance

To draw attention to the nature of hollows, and perhaps generally incentivize people to look at questlines holistically in considering the fail states to be as significant as the successes. There is an NPC in the game named Rhea who drops the pendant item if her quest terminates early by being slain by another NPC - Petrus. If her quest is progressed further to the Duke's Archives (crystal dragon library) she turns hollow and instead upon death only drops her Ivory Talisman - no Pendant. The Ivory Talisman is an interesting thing of itself to be obtained at the end of this quest, considering that its name translates to "the false dreams of the greatness of man" (poet Virgil wrote of receiving false dreams by passing through the gates of ivory, and "talis" is Latin for "so great"). But regardless, turning hollow = loss of the pendant = loss of pleasant memories.

2) For Trade Value

a.k.a. Affiliation with the Blade of the Dark Moon covenant. The Pendant may be traded to the invisible crow "Snuggly" who desires things that are soft and warm. In return, the player receives the Souvenir of Reprisal that is used to increase rank in the Dark Moon covenant. This item has the form of "a blood drained shrunken ear". Some sources say that this use for the pendant was not available at launch and only patched in later, but regardless as the director Miyazaki would have known that this trade is intended. And perhaps this is the extent of the prank - he knew for a fact that the "functionality" of the item literally did not exist but what it does have are its trade value and its lore value.

3) Rejection of the Dark Moon Covenant

The Dark Moon Covenant is unlocked by finding a plain gold coloured ring called the Darkmoon Seance Ring and equipping it to speak with secret endgame boss Gwyndolin behind a fog wall. If you ever cross the fog wall to see Gwyndolin you get kicked out of the covenant. Members of this covenant use the blue eye orb to invade other players who have committed PVE or PVP "sins", where the names of players who have done and their sin level are written in the Book of the Guilty. Altogether quite convoluted. Originally, before the launch of Dark Souls Miyazaki said that he would choose the pendant or "nothing". I imagine because he is not a game character who needs an item to recall pleasant memories - he is a person who keeps his memories in his head. And similarly the Souvenir of Reprisal would be a reprisal on a meta level. Something of a warning against being so willing to trade away happy memories in the service of an intangible entity. Weigh and measure what it costs to devote hours to hunting achievements and secrets and high ranks in video games compared to anything else that you could be doing or thinking about.

4) Foreshadowing

This is also sortof a combination of points 2 and 3. As mentioned, the Souvenir of Reprisal is in the form of a severed ear. And I can't help but notice that Sir Gideon Ofnir's illustration at the start of Elden Ring shows him lying in a bed of severed ears. Ofnir being a name for Odin, who famously has two ravens named "Thought" and "Memory". Considering that the pendant is representative of memory there are some pieces that can be put together here. Also, wiggling at the corner of my mind are the opening lines of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." Speaking of foreshadowing, put a pin in that for later - it might become relevant when discussing the significance of the Rubicon River and the longest year in the history of the Roman calendar.

But then there is also the Dark Moon covenant, which comes back in Elden Ring in connection to Ranni. It is in the lore snippets that Ranni was affiliated with the Dark Moon, but this is perhaps no longer the case - I find it more likely that she left the Dark Moon behind in Chelona Rise and now merely adopts the aesthetic. She never does use the spell that has her name attached to it. There is no dark moon covenant in Elden Ring - or any covenants - because FromSoft does not care any more to stoke player incentive to grief others or to have a group of players dedicated to griefing the "rulebreakers". People are more than happy to deliver unpleasant memories to other people for free.

So for the people who would accept nothing less than the Pendant being a mechanical key that opens a secret door - they are missing the point of the "trolling". Instead of making a pleasant memory out of exploration and appreciating the artistic work for what it is, they have chosen to make it a negative memory of the time they pushed all of the buttons in a Skinner box and nothing happened. And memetically convey this experience upon other people. Placing external blame on an internal inability to cope with trial and failure to receive a reward that was never actually promised. It is indeed a failure to internalize that basically every time Dark Souls - and Miyazaki himself - "pranks" its players it is to teach a lesson about the themes of the game underlying the lore.

(Also, the Pendant does have a legitimate use in the Dark Souls boardgame. The Pendant image is attached to the "Heroic Action" token that is flipped to indicate usage of the special abilities of each class. The boardgame was designed and released multiple years after the video game, but would have passed approvals with FromSoft, for what it's worth.)