Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, while numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to clear the game with a one branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he went through the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch run, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he progresses standardly, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup file has him completing the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third save file that combines the states of the original two.

That creates new issues, however. The merged file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the game that fails to open certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any tools he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls across dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective item that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to clip through the world. Some would find these means grounds to discredit the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through many of the game's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible branch is after all only a stick. He can't always clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.