Streaming Personality Spends 37 Straight Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a playthrough. However, although many gamers have attempted to finish the game with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the individual who aimed to beat the game with a one branch—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, like the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the stick breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the intro and initial tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and hearts. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This creates fresh issues, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the title that refuses to load certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the game partway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any tools he wields, presumably to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the Link he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that makes encounters tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally employs a glitch that allows him to clip through the environment. Some would find these means reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The YouTube version of his quest spares the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take several long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an incredible 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which depletes Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all only a stick. He can't always clone objects midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he does overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the player to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned over 1,000 users in his live stream. Rest in peace.