Streaming Personality Spends 37 Hours Trying to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that after two years since Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, although many gamers have attempted to finish the game using only a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to beat the game with a single branch—meaning, the exact same stick from start to finish.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he went through the title using only bombs or the attempt where he aimed to defeat the game with no energy. A one-branch run, though, seems impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to wield the Master Sword. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly relevant when working with the weakest weapon in the entire world. But if the stick shatters, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances normally, and the real save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the intro and first tutorial island, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and halts midway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new save file that combines the conditions of the original two.

This creates fresh issues, though. The fused save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses readily, but pulling it off means relying on an unstable build of the game that fails to load certain locations. Like everything else, he has a clever workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software midway through to ensure it starts functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Interestingly, the introductory version of Link is coded so that he cannot damage any tools he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the user gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's also how PointCrow bypasses the wear issue, as the character he transfers across dimensions is the version from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not a method that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is still a weak weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that stage, it's entirely a question of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant supply of items to boost his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a glitch that enables Link to clip through the environment. Some would consider these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do anything necessary to engage his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every spirit he uses, he'll remove a viewer from his live stream, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles look grueling. The YouTube edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer endure the entire conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take several long hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is still just a stick. He is unable to always clone items midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of Ganon. But the software compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the final attack, so technically, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.