Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One 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 creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to finish the game using just a stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the player who endeavored to clear the game with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the title using only bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch run, though, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire world. But if the stick shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he progresses normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the intro and initial starting area, and this Link gains maximum stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a third game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

That causes fresh problems, however. The fused file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the game that refuses to load some areas. As with everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that allows 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 ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey spares the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate items midway the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the player to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a stick-only playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer banned more than 1,000 users in his live stream. RIP.