Twitch Personality Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a playthrough. However, although many players have tried to finish the game using just a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he went through the game solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A single stick run, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially important when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. But if the stick breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to instruct the software to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a new save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh issues, however. The fused file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable build of the game that fails to load certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the wear problem, as the character he pulls between universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would consider these means reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban a fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take several hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible stick is after all just a stick. He can't necessarily clone items midway the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer banned more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.