Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, although many players have attempted to finish the game with just a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he went through the game using only bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is glitches. The complete answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a third game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

That creates new issues, though. The fused save file has a Link that never acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable version of the game that fails to load some areas. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then updates the game midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a ineffective item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally employs a glitch that enables Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further uses a safeguard of kinds stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a stick. He is unable to always duplicate items during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.