Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while many players have tried to complete the game using just a stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—meaning, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he went through the title solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when working with the weakest weapon in the entire world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The full story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The setup file has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character gains maximum stamina and hearts. From here, he triggers a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a third save file that combines the conditions of the first two files.

This creates new problems, though. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the title that fails to load certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the game midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets trapped at the start of the game. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the Link he pulls between dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The stick is still a weak weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a bug that allows Link to clip through the environment. A few would find these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube edit of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The indestructible stick is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to always duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.