Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

You might assume that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a playthrough. However, while many players have tried to complete the game using only a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the individual who endeavored to clear the game with a single branch—specifically, the very same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the game using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the story with no stamina. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple explanation is exploits. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh issues, however. The merged file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable build of the title that refuses to load some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he cannot break 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 PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the Link he transfers across dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a weak weapon that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of items to improve his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally employs a glitch that allows him to phase through the world. Some would find these methods reason to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll ban a fan from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The YouTube edit of his journey doesn't make the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.