Streaming Personality Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of creative challenge runs that impose unique rules on a playthrough. However, although numerous players have attempted to complete the game with just a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, like the time he played the game using only bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character gains maximum endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and halts midway through to instruct the game to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and creates a third save file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This causes new issues, however. The merged save file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that refuses to load certain locations. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, presumably to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not one that eradicates all potential friction. The branch is still a ineffective weapon that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful supply of items to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables him to clip through the world. Some would consider these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He further implements a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look painful. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last several hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily clone items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer banned over a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.