Originally posted on 2017-04-11
It’s time to jump.
Since pre-orders began the other day, the “DARK SOULS × TORCH TORCH / Ring Collection: Silvercat Ring” has received an incredible response.
In DARK SOULS II, you purchase it from the beloved Sweet Shalquoir herself. Somehow, buying a cat ring from a cat always made me strangely happy.
As DARK SOULS players already know, it greatly reduces fall damage.
In DARK SOULS III, you obtain it by summoning Sirris of the Sunless Realms from the sign on Irithyll Bridge and defeating Creighton together.
Its effect was even stronger than in the previous game. As long as there’s ground beneath you to land on, you’ll take no fall damage at all. Of course, if there’s no ground down there, you still die.
So why did we choose the “Silvercat Ring” as the very first release?
- It has a really distinctive shape
- It’s cute!
- Every player ends up using it at some point
Those were the main reasons.
Out of all the rings, this was the one that instantly felt the most like “a DARK SOULS ring” at first glance. And of course, the fact that it’s cute was also very important.
Different players naturally end up relying on different rings depending on their playstyle. Physical builds focused on strength or dexterity, magic-focused builds using intelligence or faith, and so on. The rings people treasure most will naturally differ from player to player.
But for the very first release in the series, we wanted to choose something that players would use regardless of how they played the game.
The sculpt for this piece was created by Shinya Akao (HEADLONG), who previously worked on the Hunter from Bloodborne and the Soul of Cinder from DARK SOULS III for the figure manufacturer Gecco.
He also works on Gecco’s “Hunters Arsenal” series, which recreates the trick weapons from Bloodborne in 1/6 scale. At this point, he’s probably one of the sculptors getting the most attention from FromSoftware fans right now.
Of course, he’s also a huge DARK SOULS fan himself. Whenever we play online together, I’m always blown away by the amount of lore knowledge and obscure trivia he casually drops.
And maybe most importantly for a project like this, he genuinely loves cute things too.
Honestly, there couldn’t have been a more perfect person to sculpt the “Silvercat Ring.”
He’s an incredibly busy sculptor, but we somehow managed to ask a huge favor and convinced him to take on the Silvercat project. Truly, thank you so much!
Just look at this back!
Since the in-game design only exists as a single illustration, we could only really see the ring from one angle. Even so, the sculpt perfectly captures the soft, rounded shape of a cat’s back, and honestly, it looks adorable even as a generic cat ring.
Even if you’ve never played DARK SOULS before, we’d absolutely love for you to check it out.
It really came together as a beautifully finished piece of jewelry that goes beyond the usual boundaries of character merchandise.
Thanks to Akao-san’s sculpting skills, the shape itself was never really the problem. The real challenge was the texture and coloring.
First, there were the blue eyes. They couldn’t be too dark, but they also couldn’t be too pale. Looking closely at the original illustration, the eyes aren’t smooth round spheres either. They actually have faceting to them. At first we considered using amethyst, but the color ended up being far too deep. After exploring all sorts of options, we ultimately decided to prioritize matching the original shape and color as closely as possible, and went with colored cubic zirconia instead.
The bigger challenge, though, was the ring’s unique surface texture.
Most silver accessories you see in stores are either highly polished and mirror-like, darkened in the recessed areas, oxidized for contrast, or evenly matte if they aren’t polished.
But this cat…
The more we stared at the original illustration, the more we realized we’d never really seen this kind of texture in actual jewelry before. It had this distinctly DARK SOULS-like soot-covered feel to it, and capturing that atmosphere became one of the most important and frustrating parts of the whole process.
After a huge amount of trial and error, we finally managed to arrive at the texture you see here.
The unfortunate thing is that this texture just doesn’t come across properly in photographs.
It ended up with this muted, subdued, slightly tarnished character to it.
Instead of using barrel polishing after casting, the ring is roughly hand-polished first, then oxidized, and then roughly hand-polished again. When we asked the craftsman, “So what exactly is this technique called?” the answer we got back was:
“There’s no name for it. We just tried it for the first time!”
Honestly… we can’t thank them enough.
If you’re someone who enjoys silver accessories, I think you’ll probably notice right away that the texture feels a little unusual. Since it’s made from Silver 925, it’ll continue to darken naturally over time as well. We hope you’ll enjoy seeing how the ring ages and develops its own character the more it’s worn.
And if you ever bring it to a jewelry shop for resizing or repairs, it might be worth warning them:
“Yes, it’s scratched and soot-stained on purpose, so please don’t polish it too much.”
See you in the next one.
Harada
