Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply unique restrictions on a playthrough. However, while many gamers have tried to complete the game with just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the whole world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a new save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This creates fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some areas. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software partway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he pulls between universes is the one from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows him to clip through the world. Some would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple long hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is still just a stick. He can't necessarily duplicate items midway the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over 1,000 users in his live stream. Rest in peace.