Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a playthrough. However, while many players have tried to finish the game using only a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a one stick—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he went through the game using only explosives or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A single stick run, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole game. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires full stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a new save file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This causes fresh problems, however. The merged file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the game that refuses to open certain areas. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, likely to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he transfers across universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart trick, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful supply of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows him to clip through the world. A few would find these methods reason to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove a fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last several hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow removed over 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.