Twitch Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, although numerous players have attempted to finish the game with only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the game with a single branch—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he went through the game using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the game with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is especially important when working with the weakest tool in the whole world. But if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires maximum stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and pauses midway through to tell the software to load an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and creates a new game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This creates fresh problems, though. The fused file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to load some locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins 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.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible friction. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that makes battles onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of determination and perseverance. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful supply of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban one viewer from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The video edit of his quest spares the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a stick. He can't necessarily clone objects midway the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer removed more than 1,000 users in his live stream. Rest in peace.