Streaming Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that apply unique restrictions on a playthrough. However, while numerous gamers have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with just a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the game with a single branch—meaning, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the time he went through the game using only bombs or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch run, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest tool in the entire game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So the creator does a “setup” save 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 gains maximum stamina and hearts. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a new game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable version of the game that fails to load certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful supply of items to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban one fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all only a stick. He can't necessarily duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.