Streaming Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose unique restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although many players have tried to finish the game with just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the title using only explosives or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the whole world. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” file where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires maximum stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This causes new problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that did not obtain the capability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the title that fails to open certain areas. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software partway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a ineffective item that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a bug that allows Link to phase through the world. Some would consider these methods reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

The streamer manages to get through many of the game's bosses, but the fights appear grueling. The video version of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible branch is after all just a piece of wood. He can't always clone items during the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.