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

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that impose unique restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although many players have attempted to complete the game with only a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he went through the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch run, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire world. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate the game's save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this Link gains full endurance and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a new save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates new problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy version of the game that fails to load certain areas. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he pulls between universes is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a clever technique, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows Link to clip through the world. A few would find these methods grounds to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The YouTube edit of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the whole fights, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is after all just a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned over 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.