Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, while many players have tried to complete the game with only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the title solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with no stamina. A one-branch run, however, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability system, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole game. But if the stick breaks, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” file where he progresses standardly, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full stamina and hearts. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new save file that merges the states of the original two.

That causes fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable build of the game that refuses to open some locations. Like everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear issue, as the character he transfers between universes is the version from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective item that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that enables Link to clip through the environment. A few would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy 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

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The video version of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them last several long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain battle, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all only a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed more than 1,000 people in his live stream. RIP.