Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Attempting to Beat <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 arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, although numerous players have attempted to finish the game with only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the title using only explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole world. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete answer, 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 creates a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains full endurance and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and halts partway through to tell the software to load 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 issues, however. The merged file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable version of the game that fails to open some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he pulls across universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of items to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a glitch that enables Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of the game's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The video version of his quest spares the viewer endure the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a piece of wood. He can't always clone objects midway the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 users in his live stream. RIP.