Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, although many players have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a one stick—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the title using only explosives or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the story with no energy. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the entire game. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The setup file has him going through the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link acquires full stamina and hearts. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the software to load an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a new game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

That causes new problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to open certain areas. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the Link he pulls between universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of items to improve his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that enables Link to clip through the world. A few would find these methods reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He also implements a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban a fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the audience endure the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take several long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is after all only a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer banned over 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.