Twitch Star Spends 37 Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply unique rules on a gameplay session. Yet, while many gamers have attempted to finish Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—meaning, the very same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, such as the time he played the title solely with explosives or the attempt where he aimed to beat the story with zero energy. A single stick run, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple explanation is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this character gains full stamina and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and pauses partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a new game file that combines the states of the first two files.

That creates new issues, though. The fused file has a Link that did not obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes readily, but pulling it off means depending on an unstable build of the title that fails to open some locations. Like other obstacles, 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 ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he is unable to damage any weapons he wields, presumably to prevent a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow bypasses the wear problem, as the character he pulls between universes is the version from the start of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's entirely a question of determination and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant number of consumables to improve his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these methods grounds to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further implements a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The video version of his quest spares the viewer sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them last several long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a stick. He can't always clone items midway the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not completely a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.