Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose unique rules on a playthrough. However, although many players have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, like the instance he went through the title solely with explosives or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with zero stamina. A single stick run, however, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The full story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” file where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and initial starting area, and this character gains full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the software to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This causes new problems, however. The merged file has a Link that did not obtain the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software partway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he cannot damage any tools he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear issue, as the Link he transfers across universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a ineffective weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and dedication. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll remove a fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

The streamer manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles look painful. The video version of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last several hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a stick. He can't necessarily clone objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the Master Sword as the final 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 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.