You’d think that two years after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, fans would have run out of novel challenge runs that apply special rules to a playthrough. But while plenty of people have attempted to beat Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the distinction of being a player who tried clearing the game with a single stick. As in, the same singular stick.
PointCrow is known for challenge runs like these, such as the one where he went through the game using only bombs or the one where he tried beating the game with no stamina. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible on its face. There’s the introduction to the game, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Then there’s the whole durability thing, which is of particular note when we’re dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire game. But if the stick breaks, that’s it. Game over.
So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. (Shout out to pannenkoek2012 and his culture-defining Super Mario 64 runs.) Turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom’s save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he’s limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum stamina and hearts. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a third save file that combines the states of the original two.
This creates new problems, though. The fused save file has a Link that never acquired the ability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable version of the game that refuses to load some areas. 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 ensure it starts working properly.
Curiously, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the game. But that’s also how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It’s a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is still a weak weapon that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it’s all a matter of grit and dedication. It also helps that there’s a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that allows Link to clip through the world. Some would find these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but in my mind, he’s a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every fair he uses, he’ll ban one of his viewers, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.
PointCrow manages to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom‘s bosses, but the fights look painful. The YouTube version of his journey doesn’t make the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible 23 hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases Link’s hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still only a stick. He can’t necessarily clone items midway through the battle.
So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the player to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it’s not fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?
When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.
