Streaming Star Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, while many gamers have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom using only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he went through the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile weapon in the entire game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and hearts. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh issues, though. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the title that refuses to load some areas. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible friction. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that enables him to clip through the world. A few would find these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove one fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube version of his quest spares the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The indestructible stick is after all only a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone objects midway the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so technically, it's not completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than 1,000 users in his live stream. Rest in peace.