Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose unique restrictions on a playthrough. However, although many gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the very same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the title solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the game with zero energy. A single stick run, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. But if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full endurance and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This creates fresh issues, however. The merged file has a Link that did not obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable build of the game that fails to load certain locations. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective item that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that allows him to clip through the environment. A few would find these means grounds to question the legitimacy 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 safeguard of kinds stating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll ban one fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer manages to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to use the Master Sword as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his live stream. Rest in peace.