Streaming Star Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while many gamers have tried to finish the game using just a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to beat the game with a one branch—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the instance he played the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the game with no energy. A single stick run, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire world. But if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable version of the title that fails to load certain areas. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software partway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the introductory form of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to damage any tools he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the durability problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart trick, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is still a weak item that renders encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful supply of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also employs a bug that allows him to phase through the environment. Some would find these methods grounds to discredit the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the fights look painful. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when some of them last several hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the game compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned over a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.