Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that apply unique restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while many players have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a wooden stick, streamer the streamer stands out as the player who endeavored to beat the adventure with a single branch—meaning, the very same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he went through the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with no stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” file where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires full endurance and health. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to open an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that merges the states of the first two files.

This creates new issues, though. The fused save file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to load some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then patches the software partway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the Link he pulls across universes is the one from the start of the game. It's a clever technique, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an plentiful supply of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally employs a bug that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would find these means reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll remove a fan from his live stream, creating an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look grueling. The video edit of his quest spares the audience sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take several long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which depletes Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to use the Master Sword as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer removed over a thousand people in his live stream. RIP.