Streaming Star Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a playthrough. However, while many players have tried to finish the game with just a stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole world. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he progresses standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this character gains full stamina and health. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and generates a third game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This causes fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the title that refuses to load some areas. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential friction. The branch is still a ineffective weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of items to improve his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to phase through the world. Some would find these methods reason to discredit 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 audience. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Encounter

The streamer manages to get through several of the game's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an incredible 23 hours. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.