Streaming Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a gameplay session. Yet, while many players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom using just a wooden stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a one branch—specifically, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he played the game using only explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the entire world. But if the branch shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” file where he progresses normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the intro and initial starting area, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a new game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

That causes fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy version of the game that fails to load certain areas. As with everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game partway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to damage any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability issue, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the version from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of items to improve his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that allows him to phase through the world. A few would consider these methods grounds to question the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also uses a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The YouTube edit of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible 23 straight. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still only a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone items during the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.