Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Conquer <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, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. However, while many players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the exact same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, like the time he played the game using only bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole world. But if the stick shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires full endurance and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This causes fresh issues, though. The merged save file has a Link that never acquired the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable version of the game that fails to load some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to damage any tools he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The stick is still a weak weapon that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a glitch that enables him to clip through the environment. Some would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, establishing an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's bosses, but the fights look painful. The video edit of his quest spares the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take several hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain showdown, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible stick is after all only a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone objects midway the battle.

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

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned over a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.