Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying 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 Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, while many gamers have tried to complete the game with only a stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the title solely with explosives or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly relevant when working with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he progresses normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires full endurance and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the states of the first two files.

That creates new problems, however. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable version of the title that fails to open some areas. Like everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the game. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the wear problem, as the character he transfers between universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of items to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally employs a glitch that enables Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these means grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of kinds stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of the game's main enemies, but the battles appear painful. The video version of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate objects during the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the software compels the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer removed more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.