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

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

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, such as the time he went through the game using only bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the game with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The full story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires full endurance and health. From here, he triggers 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 creates a third game file that merges the states of the first two files.

That causes fresh problems, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the game that refuses to load some areas. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the game partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the Link he pulls across universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eradicates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective item that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a glitch that enables him to clip through the environment. A few would find these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban one fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The video version of his journey doesn't make the viewer endure the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is after all only a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily duplicate items during the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, he does overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the user to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer banned over a thousand people in his live stream. Rest in peace.