Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a playthrough. However, although many players have tried to complete the game with only a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the very same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the title using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly relevant when working with the weakest tool in the entire game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the real file, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains maximum endurance and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and creates a new save file that merges the states of the first two files.

That creates fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that refuses to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the one from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of items to improve his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that allows him to clip through the environment. Some would find these means grounds to question the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The YouTube edit of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them last several hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone items midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.