Streaming Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a gameplay session. However, while many gamers have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom using only a stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the game with a one branch—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, such as the instance he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire world. But if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a new save file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh problems, however. The merged file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable build of the game that fails to open certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, presumably to prevent a situation where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he pulls across dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful supply of items to boost his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows Link to phase through the world. Some would find these methods reason to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The video version of his journey doesn't make the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone items during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software compels the player to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer banned more than a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.