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

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a gameplay session. However, although numerous gamers have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a wooden stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the exact same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, like the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with zero stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the entire world. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the intro and first starting area, and this Link acquires full endurance and hearts. From here, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and creates a third game file that combines the states of the original two.

This causes fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to load certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to damage any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the wear problem, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the version from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that enables him to phase through the environment. Some would find these means reason to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look grueling. The video version of his journey spares the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a stick. He is unable to always clone objects midway the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 people in his live stream. Rest in peace.