Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying 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 Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous players have tried to complete the game with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the title using only explosives or the effort where he tried to beat the game with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially relevant when working with the weakest weapon in the entire world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” file where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup file has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and hearts. From here, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This creates new problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the game that refuses to open some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the introductory form of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, presumably to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the version from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The stick is still a weak item that makes 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 grants him an plentiful supply of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally employs a bug that enables him to phase through the environment. A few would consider these methods reason to discredit the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He also implements a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll remove a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his quest spares the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple long hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 hours. The final villain battle, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a notable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is after all just a stick. He can't necessarily clone items during the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, he manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last attack, so technically, it's not completely a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.