Streaming Star Spends 37 Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have tried to finish the game using just a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole world. But if the branch breaks, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the original two.

This creates fresh problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable version of the title that refuses to load certain areas. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the game partway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any tools he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes battles onerous. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of items to improve his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would find these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them take several hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still only a stick. He can't always duplicate objects midway the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow removed over 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.