Streaming Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of creative challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous gamers have attempted to complete the game using just a stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the title using only explosives or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the game with zero energy. A one-branch run, however, seems unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So the creator does a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this character gains maximum endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the original two.

This creates new problems, though. The merged file has a Link that never acquired the capability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an unstable build of the title that fails to open certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the software partway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the durability problem, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of determination and dedication. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows Link to clip through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove a fan from his live stream, establishing an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look painful. The YouTube edit of his journey doesn't make the audience sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take several hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an astonishing 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable branch is still just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily clone objects midway the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. RIP.