Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose unique restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous players have attempted to complete the game with just a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the game with a one stick—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. But if the branch breaks, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The setup save has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, however. The merged file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to load some locations. Like everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the durability problem, as the Link he pulls across universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is still a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows him to phase through the world. Some would find these means reason to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also implements a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take multiple long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is still just a stick. He is unable to necessarily duplicate items during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the game compels the player to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.