Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous gamers have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the game using only bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward 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 separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and initial starting area, and this character gains maximum stamina and hearts. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the game that fails to load some areas. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the Link he pulls across universes is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful supply of items to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows him to phase through the world. Some would consider these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also implements a safeguard of kinds stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

The streamer succeeds to get through several of the game's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow banned over a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.