Twitch Personality Dedicates 37 Straight Trying to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while numerous players have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with only a stick, content creator PointCrow holds the record as the player who aimed to clear the game with a single branch—specifically, the very same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he played the title using only explosives or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the story with no stamina. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the game's introduction, which requires the hero to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire durability mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the most fragile weapon in the whole game. Yet if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

So, how? The straightforward explanation is glitches. The complete story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The setup file has him going through the intro and first starting area, and this character acquires maximum endurance and hearts. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses partway through to instruct the game to load an automatic save from the stick file. The system gets confused and creates a new game file that combines the states of the original two.

That creates fresh problems, however. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to access sacred places. Fortunately, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the game that refuses to open certain locations. As with everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory form of Link is coded so that he cannot break any tools he wields, presumably to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability problem, as the Link he transfers between dimensions is the version from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective weapon that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It also helps that there's a copying exploit that gives him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on revival fairies. He also makes use of a glitch that allows him to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He further uses a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through many of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer sit through the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them take several long hours. One enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three straight. The final villain showdown, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all just a stick. He can't always duplicate objects during the fight.

Did he succeed? Technically, he manages to defeat the beast form of Ganon. But the game forces the player to use the Master Sword as the final attack, so technically, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed over a thousand users in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.