Streaming Personality Spends 37 Straight Trying to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

One could think 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. However, although numerous gamers have attempted to finish the game using only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the title solely with bombs or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is particularly important when working with the weakest tool in the whole world. Yet if the stick breaks, that's it. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The complete story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” file where he progresses standardly, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this character acquires maximum endurance and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a new save file that combines the states of the first two files.

This creates new problems, however. The fused save file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some locations. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the Link he transfers between universes is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a smart trick, but not one that eradicates 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 perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a bug that allows Link to clip through the world. A few would consider these means reason to question the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also uses a safeguard of kinds stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights look painful. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the audience endure the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which erases Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all only a piece of wood. He can't always duplicate items midway the battle.

So, is it possible? Technically, he does defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the last attack, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.