Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: 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, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, although numerous players have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single stick—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with no energy. A single stick playthrough, however, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The setup file has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this character acquires full endurance and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that combines the conditions of the original two.

That causes new issues, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the title that refuses to open some areas. Like everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its early version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to prevent a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally employs a glitch that allows Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

The streamer manages to get through many of the game's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them take several long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all only a piece of wood. He can't always clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned over 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.