Streaming Personality Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that apply unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a one branch—specifically, the very same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the intro and initial starting area, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That causes fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the title that fails to load some areas. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the character he pulls between universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a ineffective item that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant supply of items to improve his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows him to phase through the environment. Some would find these methods reason to question the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He also uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer manages to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the battles look grueling. The video version of his journey doesn't make the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last several long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all only a stick. He is unable to always duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to wield the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

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