Twitch Personality Spends Thirty-Seven Straight Attempting to Beat <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. Yet, although many gamers have attempted to complete the game with just a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the individual who endeavored to clear the adventure with a one stick—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

PointCrow is renowned for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, like the time he played the game solely with explosives or the effort where he tried to beat the story with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the entire weapon wear mechanic, which is particularly relevant when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. It's over.

The Method Behind the Madness

How did he do it? The straightforward explanation is exploits. The full answer, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's save file system to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” save where he advances standardly, and the real save, where he's restricted. The preparatory file has him completing the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link acquires full stamina and health. From this point, he triggers a cutscene and pauses partway through to tell the game to load an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and generates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

This creates new problems, though. The fused file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the file exploit addresses readily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to load some locations. Like everything else, he has a technical workaround for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it begins working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is coded so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a scenario where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he transfers across universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a smart trick, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The stick is nonetheless a weak item that renders encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant supply of consumables to boost his strength, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables Link to phase through the environment. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the validity of the attempt, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for each fairy he uses, he'll ban a viewer from his Twitch chat, establishing an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to get through several of the game's bosses, but the fights appear grueling. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when some of them take several long hours. A particular enemy encounter, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing twenty-three straight. The Ganondorf showdown, which erases the hero's health as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The indestructible stick is after all just a stick. He can't always clone objects midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the software forces the player to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over a thousand people in his live stream. Rest in peace.