Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose special rules on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch run, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full endurance and hearts. From here, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and creates a new game file that combines the states of the first two files.

This causes new issues, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the title that fails to load certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear issue, as the character he pulls across dimensions is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eradicates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The video version of his quest doesn't make the viewer endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them last several hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily clone objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.