Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. However, although numerous players have attempted to complete the game with just a wooden stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a single branch—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A single stick playthrough, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup file has him going through the intro and first starting area, and this Link gains full stamina and hearts. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts partway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That creates fresh problems, though. The fused save file has a Link that did not obtain the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the title that refuses to open certain locations. As with everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is coded so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is still a weak weapon that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of items to boost his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, 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 every spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The video version of his quest spares the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them last multiple long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is still just a stick. He can't necessarily duplicate objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the last strike, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.