Post
The speedrunning obsession with skipping or shortening unskippable cutscenes through glitches, input timing, or region exploits.
Unskippable cutscenes are the natural enemy of speedrunners. Entire categories of glitch research exist solely to skip them: memory overwrites, out-of-bounds routing to trigger later story flags, and in some cases, buying imported region-specific copies with shorter cutscene versions. Some runners will spend hundreds of hours shaving 30 seconds off a cutscene skip.
Example
Resident Evil 4 speedrunners famously use wrong-warp glitches to skip entire cutscene chapters. MGS speedruns exploit pause-menu trickery to shorten cinematics. Final Fantasy VII's PC version is preferred for speedruns partly because of cutscene-skip trickery. Pokemon Ruby JP version is used due to faster text speed.
Why it matters
Cutscene-skip culture is an unintentional design critique. It reveals which games respect player time and which do not, and it has shaped modern game development — most post-2015 games include skippable cutscenes specifically because of runner pressure.
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