Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, although many gamers have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the title using only explosives or the effort where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The complete answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak the game's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this Link gains full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the states of the first two files.

This causes fresh issues, however. The fused save file has a Link that never acquired the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable version of the game that refuses to open some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game partway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's all a question of determination and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of items to improve his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally employs a glitch that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would find these means reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He also implements a safeguard of kinds stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all only a stick. He can't necessarily clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, 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 Twitch chat. RIP.