Streaming Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that impose unique rules on a gameplay session. However, while numerous gamers have tried to complete the game using only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the individual who aimed to beat the game with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he went through the title using only explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no stamina. A single stick run, however, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the prologue and initial starting area, and this character acquires maximum endurance and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to instruct the software to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third save file that merges the states of the first two files.

This creates new issues, however. The merged file has a Link that did not acquired the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to open certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability problem, as the character he transfers between universes is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles onerous. But at that point, it's all a question of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows Link to phase through the world. A few would find these methods reason to question the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat many of the game's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube edit of his quest spares the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain showdown, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still just a stick. He can't necessarily duplicate items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand users in his live stream. Rest in peace.