Streaming Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he went through the game solely with explosives or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with zero energy. A one-branch run, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The full story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he progresses normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this character gains full stamina and health. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the original two.

That causes fresh problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak weapon that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of items to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a bug that allows him to clip through the world. Some would find these methods grounds to discredit the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all just a stick. He can't always clone objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.