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

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while many players have tried to finish the game using only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the very same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the game using only explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is especially important when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So the creator does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new game file that combines the states of the original two.

This creates fresh issues, though. The merged file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy version of the title that refuses to load some locations. As with everything else, he has a clever 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.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he pulls between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the world. Some would find these means grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further uses a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban one viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the viewer endure the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible branch is still just a stick. He can't always clone items midway the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.