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

You might assume that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, while many gamers have tried to finish Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the title solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick run, though, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability system, which is particularly relevant when working 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 straightforward explanation 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 impact one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the intro and first starting area, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This causes new issues, though. The fused file has a Link that did not obtain the capability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means relying on an unstable build of the game that refuses to load certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game midway through to make sure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Other Challenges

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any tools he wields, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability problem, as the character he transfers between dimensions is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a weak item that makes battles onerous. But at that stage, it's all a question of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of consumables to improve his attack, or accumulate on healing spirits. He additionally employs a glitch that allows Link to clip through the world. A few would find these methods grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his audience. He further uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the fights look grueling. The YouTube edit of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing 23 hours. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate objects midway the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the beast form of the antagonist. But the software forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

In the end, the streamer removed over 1,000 users in his live stream. Rest in peace.