Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, although many players have attempted to complete the game with only a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the time he played the game using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when working with the weakest weapon in the entire game. But if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” file where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From here, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a third save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This creates fresh issues, however. The merged file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable build of the title that refuses to load some areas. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability problem, as the Link he pulls across dimensions is the version from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective item that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of determination and dedication. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows him to clip through the environment. Some would find these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also implements a safeguard of kinds stating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

The streamer succeeds to get through many of the game's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a stick. He is unable to always duplicate items midway the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.