Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while many players have tried to complete the game using only a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially relevant when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. But if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him completing the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character acquires maximum stamina and hearts. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and creates a third game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable version of the title that refuses to open certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins the game on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game partway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear issue, as the character he pulls between universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to clip through the world. A few would find these means grounds to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of kinds stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban a fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube version of his journey spares the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last several hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a stick. He can't always clone items during the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 people in his live stream. Rest in peace.