Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous players have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, like the time he went through the game solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole world. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the intro and initial tutorial island, and this Link acquires full endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This causes new problems, though. The merged file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to open certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then updates the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one 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 makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows him to clip through the world. A few would find these means grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's bosses, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them take several long hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a stick. He can't necessarily duplicate items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his live stream. Rest in peace.