Streaming Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while many gamers have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly relevant when working with the weakest tool in the whole game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple explanation is exploits. The full story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains maximum stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the states of the original two.

This creates new issues, though. The fused file has a protagonist that did not obtain the capability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the title that fails to open certain areas. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the character he transfers across universes is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is still a weak weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also employs a bug that enables Link to phase through the environment. Some would consider these methods reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further implements a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube version of his quest spares the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a stick. He can't always duplicate items midway the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the player to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

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