Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the title solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A single stick run, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability system, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire game. But if the stick breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the intro and first tutorial island, and this character gains full endurance and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and pauses midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

That causes fresh problems, though. The fused file has a Link that never acquired the capability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable version of the game that fails to load some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts the game on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any tools he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear problem, as the Link he pulls across universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is still a ineffective item that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to phase through the environment. Some would consider these methods grounds to question the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove a fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

The streamer manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take several hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate objects midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.