Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a playthrough. However, although many gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the game with a single stick—meaning, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, such as the time he went through the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires full stamina and hearts. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and generates a new game file that merges the states of the first two files.

This causes new problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that never obtain the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that refuses to load certain areas. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then updates the game midway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of the hero is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, presumably to prevent a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the version from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of determination and perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that enables him to phase through the environment. Some would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's bosses, but the battles look grueling. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them take several long hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a stick. He can't necessarily clone objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the game compels the player to use the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.