Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. However, while many gamers have attempted to complete the game using just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single branch—specifically, the very same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the title using only bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire game. But if the branch breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or 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 creates a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the intro and first starting area, and this Link acquires maximum stamina and health. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and creates a new game file that merges the states of the original two.

This causes new problems, though. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is something that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy version of the game that fails to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the software partway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he transfers between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that allows Link 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 anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He further uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove one fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through many of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them last several hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone items midway the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the last strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow banned over a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.