Twitch Star Dedicates Thirty-Seven Straight Trying 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 exhausted creative self-imposed challenges that impose unique restrictions on a playthrough. However, although many players have tried to complete Tears of the Kingdom using just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single branch—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is famous for these kinds of challenge runs, like the instance he played the game solely with bombs or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with zero stamina. A one-branch playthrough, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the game's introduction, which forces Link to use the Master Sword. Then, there's the whole durability system, which is particularly important when working with the weakest weapon in the whole world. Yet if the branch shatters, that's it. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “setup” file where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's limited. The preparatory save has him going through the prologue and first tutorial island, and this Link gains full stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to tell the game to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The system gets confused and creates a third save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

This creates new issues, though. The merged file has a protagonist that never obtain the ability to access shrines. Luckily, this is something that the save glitch fixes readily, but executing it means relying on an buggy build of the game that fails to load some locations. As with everything else, he has a clever solution for it: He begins the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then updates the software partway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Durability and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is coded so that he is unable to break any weapons he uses, likely to prevent a scenario where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls across dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The branch is nonetheless a weak item that makes encounters tedious. But at that point, it's all a question of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a duplication glitch that gives him an abundant supply of items to improve his strength, or stock up on revival fairies. He also employs a glitch that enables him to phase through the environment. Some would find these means grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful gamer who is willing to do whatever it takes to engage his audience. He also implements a safeguard of sorts stating that, for each spirit he employs, he'll ban a viewer from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

PointCrow succeeds to get through several of the game's main enemies, but the fights appear painful. The video version of his journey spares the audience endure the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible 23 straight. The final villain showdown, which erases Link's health as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable stick is still just a piece of wood. He is unable to always clone objects midway the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, PointCrow does overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the software compels the player to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer removed over a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.