Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single 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 novel self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.
PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he played the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the story with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.
The Method Behind the Madness
How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the real file, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link gains maximum endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a third save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.
This causes new issues, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to load certain areas. Like everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.
Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges
Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and dedication. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables him to phase through the world. Some would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.
Boss Fights and the Final Showdown
The streamer succeeds to get through many of the game's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them last several long hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a notable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is after all just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily clone items midway the battle.
Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the game forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?
When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.
