Streaming Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

One could think that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative challenge runs that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, while numerous players have tried to finish the game with only a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single branch—specifically, the exact same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he went through the title solely with bombs or the effort where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces the hero to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire durability system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile tool in the whole game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

So, how? The simple answer is exploits. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he progresses normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory file has him going through the prologue and initial tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and hearts. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts partway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the original two.

That causes fresh issues, however. The fused file has a Link that never acquired the ability to access shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but executing it means relying on an unstable version of the game that fails to open some locations. Like 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 Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of the hero is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, likely to prevent a situation where the user gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the Link he transfers between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a smart trick, but not one that eradicates all possible friction. The branch is still a weak item that makes encounters onerous. But at that point, it's all a question of grit and perseverance. It further helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful supply of items to boost his strength, or stock up on healing spirits. He also makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the world. A few would find these methods reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a penalty of kinds stipulating that, for each spirit he uses, he'll ban one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to not overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow succeeds to get through many of the game's bosses, but the fights appear painful. The YouTube version of his quest doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire conflicts, which is a blessing when some of them take several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing twenty-three straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all only a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate items during the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than 1,000 users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.