Streaming Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such challenge runs, such as the instance he went through the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which requires Link to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially relevant when working with the weakest weapon in the whole world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” file where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires full stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to instruct the game to load an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a third save file that combines the states of the first two files.

This causes new problems, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to load certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the Link he pulls across dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes battles tedious. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables him to phase through the environment. Some would find these means grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll ban one fan from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube version of his quest spares the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable tense moment. The indestructible branch is still only a stick. He is unable to always duplicate objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the user to wield the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.