Streaming Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom using only a wooden stick, streamer PointCrow holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the time he went through the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's restricted. The setup file has him completing the intro and first starting area, and this Link acquires full endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That creates fresh problems, however. The fused file has a Link that never obtain the capability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to load some locations. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its early version 1.0, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the one from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a weak item that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful supply of consumables to improve his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that enables him to phase through the world. Some would consider these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further implements a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, 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 succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look painful. The video edit of his journey spares the audience endure the entire fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which depletes Link's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all only a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate objects midway the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned over a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.