Twitch Star Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, although numerous players have tried to complete the game with only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who aimed to beat the game with a one branch—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the instance he went through the title using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with no energy. A single stick run, however, seems impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole game. But if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is glitches. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts partway through to instruct the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a new save file that combines the states of the original two.

This causes fresh issues, however. The fused save file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that refuses to load some areas. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any tools he uses, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the wear issue, as the Link he transfers across dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables him to clip through the world. A few would find these methods reason to discredit the validity of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

The streamer manages to get through several of the game's bosses, but the battles look grueling. The YouTube edit of his quest doesn't make the audience sit through the entire fights, which is a good thing when some of them take several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible 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 piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate objects midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only run. But what fun is that?

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