Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that apply special rules on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—specifically, the very same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the time he went through the title using only explosives or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with no stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when working with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires full endurance and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That creates fresh problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to open some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, 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 wear problem, as the Link he transfers between universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever technique, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll ban one fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still only a stick. He is unable to always clone items during the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow banned over a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.