Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative challenge runs that impose unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the time he played the title solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A single stick playthrough, however, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, 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 load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a third save file that combines the states of the original two.

This creates new problems, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the title that fails to open certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the game partway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak weapon that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the environment. Some would consider these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his journey spares the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them last multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain battle, which depletes Link's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer banned over 1,000 people in his live stream. Rest in peace.