Twitch Personality Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative challenge runs that apply special rules on a gameplay session. Yet, although many gamers have tried to complete the game with only a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the very same one throughout.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he went through the title using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character acquires maximum stamina and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to instruct the software to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and creates a new game file that combines the states of the first two files.

That creates new issues, however. The fused file has a protagonist that never obtain the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the game that fails to load certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that enables him to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of the game's bosses, but the fights look painful. The YouTube edit of his quest spares the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them take several hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is after all only a stick. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the game forces the player to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow removed over a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.