Twitch Personality Spends 37 Straight Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to complete the game using only a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he tried to beat the story with zero stamina. A single stick run, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So the creator does a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The setup file has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this character gains full endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a new save file that merges the states of the first two files.

That causes fresh problems, however. The merged file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an buggy version of the title that refuses to load some areas. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software partway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any tools he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible friction. The branch is still a ineffective item that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful supply of items to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that enables him to phase through the world. A few would find these means reason to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all just a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the software forces the player to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.