Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, although numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with zero energy. A one-branch run, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the whole world. But if the stick shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The setup file has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires full stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a new save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, though. The fused file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a weak weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows him to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods reason to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He further implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube version of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The indestructible branch is still only a stick. He can't always clone items during the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the software compels the player to wield the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer removed more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.