Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight 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 arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, although many gamers have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom using just a wooden stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single branch—specifically, the very same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no energy. A one-branch run, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole world. But if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this character acquires full stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that combines the states of the original two.

This creates new problems, however. The fused save file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy build of the game that refuses to open some areas. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the introductory form of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The branch is still a weak weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that point, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful supply of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He further implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The video version of his quest doesn't make the viewer endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them last several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing 23 hours. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate items during the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, he manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.