Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that apply unique rules on a playthrough. However, while many gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single stick—specifically, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole world. But if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's save file system to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the real file, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character acquires maximum stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and generates a third game file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates new problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy build of the game that fails to load certain locations. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the game midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of Link is coded so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a question of determination and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also employs a glitch that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would find these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

The streamer manages to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last several hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate objects midway the fight.

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

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.