Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of novel challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to finish the game with only a wooden stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the instance he played the game using only explosives or the attempt where he tried to beat the game with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and initial starting area, and this character gains full endurance and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates fresh issues, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable version of the title that fails to load some areas. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the game partway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers between universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also employs a glitch that enables Link to clip through the world. A few would find these means reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The video version of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a piece of wood. He can't always clone items during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than a thousand people in his live stream. Rest in peace.