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

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have run out of novel self-imposed challenges that impose special rules on a gameplay session. However, while many gamers have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the player who endeavored to beat the game with a one stick—meaning, the exact same stick throughout.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of difficult playthroughs, such as the instance he went through the game solely with explosives or the effort where he aimed to defeat the story with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest tool in the entire world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. Game over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple explanation is glitches. The complete story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator does a “preparation” file where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and initial starting area, and this Link acquires full stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cinematic and pauses midway through to instruct the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The system gets mixed up and generates a new game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That causes new issues, though. The fused file has a Link that never acquired the ability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch addresses easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the title that refuses to load some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a clever solution for it: He starts Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it starts functioning correctly.

Overcoming Weapon Wear and Additional Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the game. But that's also how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the character he pulls across universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a smart technique, but not a method that eliminates all possible difficulty. The branch is still a ineffective weapon that renders encounters onerous. But at that stage, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also helps that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an plentiful number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that enables him to phase through the environment. A few would find these means grounds to question the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is ready to do whatever it takes to entertain his audience. He further implements a penalty of sorts stating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not depend too much on them.

Boss Fights and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to get through many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights appear grueling. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the viewer endure the entire fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last multiple hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an astonishing 23 straight. The final villain battle, which depletes Link's hearts as it progresses, is a notable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is after all only a stick. He can't necessarily clone items midway the fight.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to wield the Master Sword as the final attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive run. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his Twitch chat. RIP.