Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. However, although numerous gamers have attempted to finish the game using just a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the game with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, like the instance he played the title solely with explosives or the attempt where he tried to beat the game with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the first two files.

This causes new issues, though. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the title that refuses to open some locations. Like everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he wields, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the version from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of items to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables him to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The video edit of his journey spares the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he manages to defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to use the Master Sword as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

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