Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while many players have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom using only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same one throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the title solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a third save file that combines the states of the original two.

This causes fresh problems, however. The fused file has a Link that did not obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable build of the game that fails to open some areas. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the Link he transfers across universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eradicates all potential friction. The branch is still a ineffective weapon that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful supply of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He also implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer manages to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles look painful. The YouTube edit of his quest spares the audience sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which depletes Link's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all only a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the software forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.