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

You might assume that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, although many gamers have tried to complete the game using only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he went through the title using only bombs or the effort where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A one-branch run, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the branch breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he progresses standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains maximum endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and halts midway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a new save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable version of the title that fails to open certain areas. Like everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's also how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and dedication. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful number of items to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables him to clip through the world. Some would find these means grounds to discredit the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He also implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the battles look grueling. The video version of his journey spares the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them last several hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all only a stick. He is unable to always duplicate objects midway the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, he manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his live stream. RIP.