Twitch Personality Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of novel challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous players have attempted to finish the game using only a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the game with a one stick—specifically, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the title using only bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A single stick run, however, seems impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character gains maximum stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and creates a new save file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

That causes new problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the title that fails to open some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any tools he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls between universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that allows him to phase through the environment. Some would consider these methods grounds to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll remove a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's bosses, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the audience sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a stick. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the player to use the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only 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.