Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that apply special rules on a playthrough. Yet, although numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the game using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the game with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's save file system to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he progresses standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the intro and first starting area, and this character acquires full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the software to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a Link that did not acquired the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy version of the title that refuses to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers across universes is the one from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the world. A few would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them last several long hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still only a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate items during the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over 1,000 users in his live stream. RIP.