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

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose unique rules on a playthrough. However, although many players have tried to finish the game using just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the game using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially relevant when working with the most fragile weapon in the entire game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him completing the intro and first starting area, and this Link gains maximum endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh problems, though. The fused file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the title that fails to open some locations. Like everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the game midway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to damage any tools he wields, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates 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 perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows him to clip through the environment. Some would consider these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

The streamer manages to get through many of the game's bosses, but the battles look painful. The video version of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take several hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone objects during the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the Master Sword as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer removed more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.