Streaming Personality Spends 37 Straight Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, although many gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a one stick—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he played the title using only explosives or the effort where he tried to defeat the game with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole world. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak the game's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the intro and first starting area, and this character acquires maximum stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and halts midway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a new save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates new problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear issue, as the Link he transfers between dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak weapon that makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables him to phase through the environment. Some would find these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He further uses a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of the game's bosses, but the battles look painful. The YouTube edit of his quest spares the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a stick. He can't always duplicate items midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow removed over a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.