Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous players have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he went through the title solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the story with no energy. A one-branch run, however, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire world. But if the stick shatters, that's it. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is glitches. The full story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character gains full endurance and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts midway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That causes new issues, though. The merged file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to load some areas. Like everything else, he has a technical solution 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 functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Challenges

Curiously, the prologue form of the hero is coded so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the user gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the Link he transfers between universes is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is still a ineffective weapon that renders battles tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows him to clip through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to question the validity of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further uses a safeguard of kinds stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove a fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey spares the audience endure the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an incredible 23 straight. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable tense moment. The indestructible branch is still only a stick. He is unable to always clone items during the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the software forces the user to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, 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 more than 1,000 people in his live stream. RIP.