You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have run out of creative self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. However, while numerous gamers have tried to finish the game with just a stick, content creator the streamer stands out as the individual who endeavored to beat the game with a single branch—meaning, the exact same one throughout.
The streamer is renowned for such difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the game using only bombs or the effort where he tried to defeat the story with no energy. A single stick run, however, sounds unfeasible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is especially important when working with the weakest tool in the whole world. Yet if the branch breaks, that's the end. It's over.
So, How?
How did he do it? The straightforward answer is glitches. The complete answer, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can tweak Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have separate game sessions that affect one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he progresses normally, and the actual file, where he's limited. The setup file has him going through the intro and first starting area, and this character acquires maximum stamina and health. From here, he triggers a cinematic and pauses midway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the branch-only file. The game gets confused and creates a third game file that combines the states of the first two files.
This causes new issues, however. The merged save file has a protagonist that never acquired the ability to enter sacred places. Fortunately, this is something that the save glitch fixes easily, but pulling it off means depending on an buggy build of the game that fails to open some locations. Like everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He starts the game on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the game partway through to ensure it begins working properly.
Overcoming Durability and Other Challenges
Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he cannot damage any weapons he uses, presumably to prevent a situation where the player gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how PointCrow gets around the durability problem, as the character he pulls between universes is the version from the start of the game. It's a smart technique, but not one that eliminates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a weak item that makes battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a matter of grit and perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an abundant number of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a bug that enables him to clip through the environment. A few would find these methods grounds to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a resourceful player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of kinds stipulating that, for each fairy he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an motivation to not overly rely on them.
Major Battles and the Final Showdown
PointCrow manages to defeat several of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the fights look grueling. The video version of his quest spares the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a good thing when a few of them take several hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, requires an incredible twenty-three straight. The final villain battle, which depletes the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all just a stick. He can't necessarily clone objects midway the fight.
So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the dragon version of the antagonist. But the game forces the user to wield the legendary weapon as the last strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a branch-exclusive playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?
When everything is said and done, the streamer banned over a thousand people in his Twitch chat. Rest in peace.
