Streaming Star Spends Thirty-Seven Hours Attempting to Beat <em>The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, enthusiasts would have exhausted novel challenge runs that impose special restrictions on a playthrough. However, although many players have attempted to complete the game with just a wooden stick, content creator PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a one branch—specifically, the exact same one from start to finish.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, such as the instance he went through the title using only bombs or the attempt where he tried to defeat the story with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, though, sounds impossible at face value. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to wield the Master Sword. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially relevant when dealing with the most fragile 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 answer is glitches. The complete story, believe it or not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can tweak the game's save file system to have separate playthroughs that affect one another. So the creator creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this character acquires maximum stamina and health. From this point, he starts a cinematic and halts midway through to tell the game to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets confused and generates a third save file that merges the states of the first two files.

This creates new problems, though. The merged save file has a protagonist that did not acquired the ability to enter shrines. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit fixes easily, but executing it means depending on an unstable version of the title that fails to load some areas. As with everything else, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its early 1.0 build, and then patches the game partway through to ensure it begins functioning correctly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue version of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any tools he uses, presumably to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how the streamer bypasses the durability issue, as the character he pulls across dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever technique, but not a method that eradicates all potential difficulty. The branch is still a weak weapon that makes encounters tedious. But at that stage, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It also aids that there's a copying exploit that gives him an plentiful number of items to improve his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He additionally makes use of a glitch that allows Link to phase through the world. A few would consider these means reason to discredit the legitimacy of the run, but in my mind, he's a inventive player who is willing to do whatever it takes to entertain his viewer. He also uses a safeguard of sorts stipulating that, for every fairy he employs, he'll remove one viewer from his Twitch chat, creating an incentive to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Showdown

The streamer manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's bosses, but the battles appear painful. The YouTube edit of his journey spares the viewer sit through the whole conflicts, which is a good thing when a few of them take several hours. One boss fight, a powerful foe, takes an astonishing 23 hours. The Ganondorf battle, which depletes the hero's health as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The indestructible branch is after all just a piece of wood. He can't necessarily duplicate items midway the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, PointCrow manages to overcome the beast form of Ganon. But the game compels the player to wield the legendary weapon as the final strike, so technically, it's not fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow removed more than a thousand users in his live stream. RIP.