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

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have attempted to finish the game with only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the instance he played the game using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to defeat the game with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds unfeasible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole durability mechanic, which is especially important when working with the most fragile tool in the whole game. But if the stick breaks, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The complete answer, I kid you not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first starting area, and this Link gains full endurance and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and creates a new game file that merges the states of the first two files.

This creates fresh issues, though. The fused file has a protagonist that never acquired the capability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means depending on an buggy build of the title that fails to open some locations. As with other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the game midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, presumably to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls between universes is the one from the start of the story. It's a smart trick, but not one that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that renders encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of items to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows him to phase through the world. Some would consider these means grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is ready to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He further implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban one fan from his live stream, establishing an incentive to not depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The video version of his journey spares the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when some of them take several long hours. A particular boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it unfolds, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone items during the battle.

Did he succeed? Technically, he does overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. RIP.