Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Beat <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 arrived, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose special rules on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous gamers have tried to finish the game using just a stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he played the game using only bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the game with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the intro and first starting area, and this character gains full endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the software to load an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and generates a new save file that merges the states of the original two.

That creates new issues, however. The merged save file has a Link that did not acquired the capability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to load certain areas. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers between universes is the version from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible friction. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of determination and perseverance. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful supply of items to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables him to clip through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further implements a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll ban a fan from his live stream, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat many of the game's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is still just a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.