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

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a gameplay session. However, while many gamers have attempted to complete the game using just a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the game with a single stick—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with no stamina. A single stick run, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is especially important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the branch breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual file, where he's limited. The setup save has him completing the intro and initial starting area, and this character gains maximum endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates fresh problems, however. The merged file has a Link that did not obtain the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to load some areas. Like everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the software partway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Overcoming Durability and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the player gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the wear problem, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the version from the start of the game. It's a smart trick, but not a method that eliminates all possible friction. The stick is still a weak item that makes battles onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables Link to clip through the world. A few would find these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He also uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The video version of his journey spares the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases Link's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all just a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily duplicate objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game compels the player to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over 1,000 people in his live stream. Rest in peace.