Streaming Personality Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to beat the game with a single branch—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for such challenge runs, such as the instance he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A single stick run, however, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the intro and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, though. The fused file has a protagonist that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable build of the title that fails to load certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective item that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a question of determination and dedication. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful supply of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that enables Link to phase through the world. A few would find these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the battles look grueling. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take multiple long hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate items midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.