Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 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 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous gamers have tried to complete the game using only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the instance he went through the game using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the weakest tool in the entire world. But if the stick shatters, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he progresses standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a new save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This causes fresh issues, however. The fused save file has a Link that never obtain the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that refuses to open certain locations. Like everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls between universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective item that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful supply of items to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a glitch that allows him to clip through the environment. A few would find these means reason to question the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The video version of his quest doesn't make the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take several hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes Link's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.