Twitch Personality Dedicates Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Conquer <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> Using a Single Branch

You might assume that after two years since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have run out of novel challenge runs that impose special rules on a playthrough. Yet, while many players have attempted to finish the game using only a wooden stick, content creator the streamer holds the record as the individual who aimed to clear the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the very same stick from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, like the time he went through the game using only explosives or the attempt where he tried to beat the story with no stamina. A single stick playthrough, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear mechanic, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the entire game. Yet if the stick breaks, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full answer, believe it or not, is parallel universes. Apparently, you can tweak the game's saving mechanism to have separate playthroughs that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he progresses standardly, and the actual file, where he's restricted. The setup file has him completing the intro and initial tutorial island, and this character gains full endurance and hearts. From here, he starts a cutscene and pauses midway through to tell the software to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That causes new problems, however. The fused save file has a protagonist that did not obtain the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an buggy version of the game that fails to load some areas. As with everything else, he has a technical 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 begins working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Additional Challenges

Curiously, the introductory version of Link is coded so that he cannot break any tools he uses, presumably to prevent a situation where the player gets stuck at the start of the game. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the durability problem, as the character he pulls across universes is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all possible friction. The branch is nonetheless a ineffective item that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's entirely a matter of grit and dedication. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables Link to clip through the world. Some would consider these means reason to question the legitimacy 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 uses a penalty of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove one fan from his Twitch chat, establishing an incentive to avoid overly rely on them.

Major Battles and the Last Showdown

The streamer succeeds to defeat several of the game's main enemies, but the battles appear painful. The video edit of his journey doesn't make the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when some of them take multiple long hours. One enemy encounter, Queen Gibdo, requires an astonishing twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which erases Link's hearts as it unfolds, is a memorable nail-biter. The indestructible branch is after all only a piece of wood. He is unable to necessarily duplicate objects during the fight.

So, is it possible? Technically, he manages to overcome the beast form of the antagonist. But the software compels the user to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not fully a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

In the end, the streamer banned more than a thousand people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.