Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: 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, enthusiasts would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while many gamers have tried to complete the game with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the game with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, like the instance he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no energy. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole world. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's save file system to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this character acquires full stamina and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This causes new problems, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the title that refuses to load certain locations. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its early version 1.0, and then updates the game partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is still a ineffective item that makes encounters tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them last several hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a piece of wood. He can't necessarily clone items during the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.