Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Stick

One could think 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 gameplay session. However, while many gamers have attempted to finish the game with only a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability system, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he progresses normally, and the real file, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this Link gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and creates a third game file that combines the states of the original two.

That causes new issues, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some locations. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software partway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot damage any tools he wields, presumably to avoid a scenario where the user gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of items to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables him to phase through the world. A few would consider these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube edit of his quest spares the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them take several hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still just a stick. He can't always duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.