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

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a gameplay session. However, while many gamers have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom using just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the game solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A single stick playthrough, however, seems impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link gains maximum endurance and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the game to load an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That causes fresh issues, though. The fused file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the game that refuses to open certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the character he transfers between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that makes encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows him to clip through the world. A few would find these means reason to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further implements a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation 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 battles look grueling. The YouTube edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which depletes Link's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so technically, it's not completely a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.