Streaming Star Dedicates 37 Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, although many players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom using just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the game with a single stick—specifically, the very same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the time he went through the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with zero stamina. A single stick run, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup file has him completing the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new save file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This causes new problems, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that never obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy build of the game that refuses to load certain areas. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the game midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he pulls across universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eliminates all potential friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that enables him to phase through the world. Some would find these means grounds to question the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Encounter

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them last several long hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is still only a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate items midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to use the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned over a thousand people in his live stream. Rest in peace.