Twitch Star Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, although many gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the very same one throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch run, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” file where he progresses standardly, and the real file, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him going through the prologue and initial starting area, and this character gains full endurance and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and halts partway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a new game file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This causes fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a Link that never acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable build of the game that fails to load certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software partway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the Link he transfers across dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows him to phase through the environment. A few would consider these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He also uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is after all just a stick. He can't always duplicate objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer removed more than a thousand people in his live stream. Rest in peace.