Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight 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 arrived, fans would have run out of novel challenge runs that apply unique rules on a playthrough. However, although numerous players have attempted to finish the game with just a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the individual who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for such challenge runs, like the time he played the game solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no energy. A single stick playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when working with the most fragile weapon in the entire game. But if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and pauses midway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the first two files.

This creates new problems, though. The fused save file has a Link that never acquired the capability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to load certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the game partway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any tools he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers across universes is the version from the start of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The branch is still a weak item that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of items to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the world. A few would find these methods reason to question the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles look painful. The video version of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still only a piece of wood. He can't always clone objects during the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the player to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer removed more than a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.