God of War is a big, sprawling game that could easily take you dozens of hours. That’s the kind of challenge that speedrunners love, and they’ve already been able to beat the PlayStation 4 game in sub-10 hours. The one problem? A bunch of that playtime is spent watching unskippable cutscenes.
Streamer uhTrance holds what appears to be the current world record for running the game; he finished it in seven hours, 49 minutes. But as both he and YouTube commenters on the livestream archive said, that run might have been shorter if not for the plethora of dialogue scenes that the player can’t fast-forward through.
There’s nothing wrong with cutscenes or plot development or story moments to flesh out characters; those are some of the things God of War does best. For speedrunners, though, the game may as well be a “cutscene simulator.”
BnH247 finished the game in eight hours, 11 minutes over the weekend, which easily ranks highly among the best completion times. But he said he has no plans to ever try again, precisely because of all of that story.
“So this game is one of the biggest cutscene simulator games I’ve personally played so I am definitely not running this game again, literally no point, so little gameplay,” he wrote in the YouTube description of his stream archive. “I could memorize where to go and what to do, improve combat a little bit and maybe theres a skip or two but honestly the improved run wouldn’t be that much different so it would be a waste of time lol.”
Maybe God of War doesn’t make for the most fun speedruns, but it’s still wild to hear that people can finish it in more than half the time it takes the average player ... cutscenes or not.