Streaming Personality Spends 37 Straight Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a gameplay session. However, although numerous players have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero 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. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains maximum endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts partway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a new game file that combines the states of the original two.

This creates fresh issues, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable build of the game that fails to load certain locations. Like everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the durability problem, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The stick is still a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant supply of items to improve his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that enables him to phase through the world. Some would consider these methods reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube version of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a blessing when some of them last multiple hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is still just a piece of wood. He can't always clone items during the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

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