Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Straight 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 creative challenge runs that apply unique restrictions on a playthrough. However, although many players have tried to complete the game using just a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to clear the game with a one stick—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game using only bombs or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the game with no energy. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially relevant when working with the weakest tool in the whole game. But if the branch breaks, that's it. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward answer is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “setup” file where he advances normally, and the real file, where he's restricted. The setup save has him completing the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this character acquires maximum stamina and health. From here, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the software to open an automatic save from the stick file. The game gets confused and generates a new save file that merges the states of the original two.

That causes fresh issues, though. The merged file has a protagonist that did not acquired the capability to enter sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to load some locations. As with everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the Link he pulls across universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The stick is still a ineffective item that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to phase through the world. A few would consider these methods reason to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He also implements a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for every spirit he employs, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat many of the game's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The video version of his quest doesn't make the audience endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them last multiple long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all only a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the player to use the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.