Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although many players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the title using only bombs or the effort where he tried to beat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire game. But if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and generates a third save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This causes new problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some areas. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the introductory form of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the Link he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows him to phase through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of the game's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience endure the whole fights, which is a good thing when some of them take several hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an incredible 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer banned over a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.