Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply unique restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while many players have attempted to complete the game with just a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a single stick—specifically, the very same stick throughout.

The streamer is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the title solely with explosives or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, however, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire weapon wear system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the weakest tool in the whole game. But if the stick shatters, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” file where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this character gains full stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cutscene and pauses partway through to instruct the game to open an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the states of the first two files.

That creates fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a Link that did not acquired the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable build of the title that refuses to load certain locations. As with other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins the game on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the introductory version of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, presumably to prevent a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the Link he pulls across universes is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a weak item that renders encounters onerous. But at that point, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant supply of consumables to improve his strength, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a glitch that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would find these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He further uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear grueling. The video edit of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone objects during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software compels the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.