Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a One Branch

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while many players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the title using only bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the weakest weapon in the entire world. But if the stick shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full story, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains full stamina and hearts. From here, he triggers a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a third game file that combines the conditions of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an buggy version of the title that refuses to load certain locations. Like everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the game midway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the durability issue, as the Link he transfers between universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eradicates all potential friction. The stick is still a ineffective item that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows him to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He further implements a penalty of kinds stating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

PointCrow manages to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a stick. He can't always clone objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software compels the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 users in his live stream. RIP.