Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative challenge runs that apply unique restrictions on a gameplay session. However, although numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one stick—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the time he played the game using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole world. But if the branch breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this character gains full stamina and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses midway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and creates a new game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh problems, though. The fused file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable build of the title that fails to load some locations. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts the game on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he wields, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a question of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of items to boost his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables him to phase through the world. Some would find these means reason to question the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He further uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video version of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone items during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.