Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose unique restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, although many gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he played the title using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch run, however, seems impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole world. But if the stick shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires full stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and creates a new game file that merges the states of the first two files.

This creates new issues, however. The fused save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the title that fails to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts the game on its early version 1.0, and then patches the software partway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, presumably to prevent a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability problem, as the Link he transfers between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a weak weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would consider these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the battles look painful. The video version of his quest spares the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing 23 hours. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily clone items during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.