Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. However, while many players have attempted to finish the game with just a wooden stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the title solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, however, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he progresses normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save 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 halts partway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and generates a new save file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates fresh issues, however. The fused file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy version of the title that fails to load certain areas. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the game partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory form of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear issue, as the Link he pulls across dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the world. Some would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look grueling. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the audience endure the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible 23 straight. The final villain battle, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a stick. He is unable to necessarily duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.