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

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative challenge runs that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom using only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he went through the game solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A one-branch run, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The full story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full stamina 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 creates a new save file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a Link that did not obtain the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to load certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the durability problem, as the character he pulls across dimensions is the version from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a question of determination and dedication. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of items to improve his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also employs a glitch that enables Link to phase through the world. Some would find these methods reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further implements a safeguard of kinds stating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Encounter

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is still only a piece of wood. He can't always clone items during the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.