Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting 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. However, while numerous players have attempted to finish the game using only a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the game with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the title solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the game with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly relevant when working with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. Yet if the stick shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's limited. The setup file has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link gains full endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that combines the states of the first two files.

This creates fresh issues, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy build of the title that refuses to load certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the game partway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any tools he wields, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear issue, as the Link he transfers across universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a weak weapon that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally employs a bug that enables him to clip through the environment. Some would find these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last several long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The indestructible branch is after all just a stick. He can't necessarily clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.