Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

You might assume that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that apply unique restrictions on a gameplay session. However, although numerous players have tried to complete the game using just a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the title using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the story with zero stamina. A single stick run, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is especially relevant when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole world. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he progresses standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a third save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This causes fresh problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means relying on an unstable build of the game that refuses to load some areas. Like other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck 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 one from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows Link to clip through the world. A few would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove one fan from his live stream, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the audience sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is after all just a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.