Twitch Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while many gamers have tried to finish the game with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the game solely with bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch run, however, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole world. But if the branch shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple explanation 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 affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup save has him going through the prologue and initial starting area, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to instruct the software to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a third game file that combines the states of the original two.

That creates new problems, though. The merged file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an buggy version of the title that refuses to open certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory form of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he wields, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability problem, as the Link he transfers between universes is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eradicates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables Link to phase through the environment. A few would find these methods reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his audience. He further implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer manages to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The video version of his journey spares the audience endure the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all just a stick. He can't necessarily clone items midway the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer banned more than a thousand people in his live stream. Rest in peace.