Twitch Star Dedicates 37 Hours Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a One Branch

You might assume that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrived, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special rules on a playthrough. However, although numerous players have tried to finish the game with just a stick, streamer the streamer holds the record as the player who aimed to beat the game with a one branch—meaning, the exact same one throughout.

The streamer is renowned for such challenge runs, like the instance he played the title solely with explosives or the effort where he tried to beat the story with zero energy. A one-branch run, though, seems impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which requires the hero to use the legendary blade. Then, there's the whole weapon wear system, which is particularly important when dealing with the weakest weapon in the whole game. But if the branch shatters, that's the end. Game over.

The Method Behind the Madness

So, how? The simple answer is glitches. The full story, believe it or not, is alternate dimensions. Apparently, you can manipulate the game's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow does a “setup” save where he advances normally, and the actual save, where he's restricted. The preparatory save has him completing the prologue and first tutorial island, and this character acquires maximum stamina and hearts. From this point, he starts a cutscene and halts partway through to instruct the software to open an auto-save from the stick file. The game gets mixed up and creates a third game file that merges the conditions of the first two files.

That creates fresh problems, though. The merged save file has a Link that never obtain the ability to enter shrines. Fortunately, this is an issue that the save glitch fixes easily, but executing it means relying on an unstable build of the game that refuses to load certain locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical solution for it: He begins Tears of the Kingdom on its pre-release version 1.0, and then patches the software midway through to make sure it starts working properly.

Bypassing Weapon Wear and Other Hurdles

Interestingly, the prologue form of the hero is programmed so that he cannot break any weapons he wields, likely to avoid a situation where the user gets stuck at the beginning of the adventure. But that's also how the streamer gets around the durability issue, as the character he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the story. It's a clever trick, but not one that eliminates all potential friction. The branch is nonetheless a weak weapon that renders battles onerous. But at that point, it's all a matter of determination and perseverance. It further helps that there's a duplication glitch that grants him an abundant number of items to boost his attack, or accumulate on revival fairies. He also makes use of a bug that allows Link to clip through the environment. A few would find these means reason to question the legitimacy of the run, but to my view, he's a inventive player who is willing to do anything necessary to entertain his viewer. He further uses a penalty of kinds stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove one viewer from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid depend too much on them.

Major Battles and the Final Encounter

PointCrow manages to defeat many of Tears of the Kingdom's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The YouTube version of his journey doesn't make the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when some of them take multiple long hours. A particular boss fight, Queen Gibdo, requires an incredible 23 straight. The final villain battle, which erases the hero's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable tense moment. The unbreakable stick is still only a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone items midway the battle.

Did he succeed? In a matter of speaking, he manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the game forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the final strike, so strictly speaking, it's not quite fully a branch-exclusive run. But what fun is that?

When everything is said and done, PointCrow banned over 1,000 people in his Twitch chat. RIP.