Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

You might assume that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous players have tried to complete the game using just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a one branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A single stick run, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly relevant when working with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This creates new problems, however. The fused save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the capability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable version of the title that fails to open certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the start of the game. But that's also how the streamer gets around the wear issue, as the character he transfers across universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and dedication. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also employs a glitch that allows Link to clip through the world. A few would find these methods reason to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban one viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat many of the game's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible twenty-three straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a stick. He can't always duplicate objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.