Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, while many gamers have tried to finish the game using just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he went through the game solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole durability system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So the creator does a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and generates a new save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That causes new problems, however. The merged file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable version of the title that refuses to open certain areas. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he pulls between dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a ineffective item that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a question of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that enables Link to phase through the world. A few would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through many of the game's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the viewer endure the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take multiple hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible branch is still just a stick. He is unable to always clone objects during the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

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