If you were ravenously consuming prerelease information for Dark Souls like I was, then you probably stumbled across a helpful nugget from its director Hidetaka Miyazaki: start with the Pendant. You see, there were a few different “gifts” the player could receive at the start of their game. Each had differeing but useful effects, except for the pendant, which was mysterious in that it had no effects listed. It’s decription was: “Trinket. No effect, but fond memories comfort travelers.”

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So, of course, being the hardcore and faithful player that I am, I snubbed the Tiny Being’s ring which boosted my heath, and admonished my roommate, who chose the Master Key (which makes accessing many areas of the game easier), for cheapening the Dark Souls experience. Did I even consider the binoculars? No. I was a devoted disciple of Dark Souls, I was going to listen to Miyazaki, so I chose the pendant. I looked throughout the game for ways to use it and looked for differences between my game experience and my roommates, but nothing betrayed its true purpose (you could trade it for a Souvenir of Reprisal, but this was easily acquirable in other ways, so there had to be more to this ornament). Never did I discover its function, but I was comforted by the fact that for whatever I did in the game, this little piece of jewelry, given to me by Miyazaki himself, was helping me along. So when I logged onto Eurogamer this morning, I was terribly excited when I saw the headline “Dark Souls’ director reveals the pendant’s true purpose”. I opened it up, frantically scanned through the article and saw this:

“When it comes to the Pendant, I actually had a little bit of an intention to play a prank,” Miyazaki said in an interview with IGN.

Wait what?

That’s right. When it said it had “no effect,” what it meant was, “no seriously, it has no effect.”

Miyazaki forgot one: making me feel like an asshole. Chat gem anyone?