Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the game solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him completing the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a new save file that merges the states of the first two files.

This causes new issues, though. The fused file has a Link that never obtain the capability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to load some locations. Like everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers across universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. A few would find these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further implements a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to defeat many of the game's main enemies, but the fights look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's hearts as it progresses, is a notable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.