Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while many players have tried to complete the game using just a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the exact same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the time he went through the title using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the entire world. Yet if the stick shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires full stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new game file that combines the states of the original two.

This causes fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a Link that never acquired the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the title that fails to open some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution 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 functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any tools he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the wear issue, as the character he transfers across universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows him to phase through the world. Some would consider these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take several long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a stick. He can't always clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 users in his live stream. Rest in peace.