Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous players have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, like the time he played the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is particularly relevant when working with the weakest weapon in the entire game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link gains maximum stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and generates a third save file that combines the states of the original two.

That causes new issues, however. The fused file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the game that refuses to load some locations. Like everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the Link he transfers across dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is still a weak weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of determination and dedication. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant number of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a glitch that enables him to clip through the environment. Some would find these means grounds to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban a fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube version of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a stick. He can't always clone items during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

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