Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, although many gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a single stick—specifically, the very same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he went through the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the story with zero stamina. A single stick run, however, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially relevant when working with the weakest weapon in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains full endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates new issues, however. The merged file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable version of the title that refuses to open some areas. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the wear problem, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is still a weak item that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He also employs a glitch that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look grueling. The video version of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last several long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible 23 hours. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he manages to defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 users in his live stream. RIP.