Streaming Star Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique restrictions on a playthrough. However, while many gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the time he went through the game using only explosives or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The complete story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator does a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the intro and initial starting area, and this character acquires maximum 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 generates a new save file that combines the states of the original two.

This causes fresh problems, though. The fused file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable build of the title that fails to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he transfers across universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is still a ineffective item that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a question of grit and perseverance. It further 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 additionally makes use of a glitch that allows him to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them take several hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is still only a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.