Streamer Ainrun Completes Elden Ring in 2.5 Hours No-Hit No-Level-Ups

Elden Ring is FromSoftware‘s latest child and, as such, it is an unforgiving, challenging interactive experience that requires a great amount of skill, practice and, most importantly, time on your part for it to be completed.

It takes a player a minimum of 50 hours to beat the game, making it one of the longest FromSoftware titles ever (if you only consider base games).

But for some people, known as “speedrunners”, beating Elden Ring is a matter of only a couple of hours more or less. And, most shockingly, a player in particular managed to get to the finale without ever leveling up or taking a single hit.

In today’s article, we’re going to learn about the incredible feat of the player who completed Elden Ring in 2.5 hours without leveling up or getting hit!

The art of speedrunning

Before we get into the case of the aforementioned player, I feel like it is better to give you some information about why some players rush to finish their games in so little time.

What these players engage in is called “speedrunning“. Speedrunning is an established practice within the gaming community consisting in completing a game as fast as possible. This challenge started gaining traction in the 90s, and from that point onward it progressively evolved in a more competitive way.

Many online communities centered around certain games in fact offer leaderboard rankings that represent the primary competitive metric for speedrunning. Players constantly compete and try to one up each other in order to set a new record: whoever speedruns a game in the shortest time possible earns the first spot and, consequently, gains some fame among his/her peers.

Of course, players will need to provide the community with clear video, or at least visual, evidence that can attest to their runtime. The best way to prevent the speedrunners from cheating or fabricating the results is to ask them to livestream the event.

Speedrun events are often showcased at marathons organized within gaming conventions. In this case, two or more speedrunners will race against each other.

Here’s the speedrunner who completed Elden Ring with no hits or levels up in 2.5 hours

Now, Ainrun is the name of the Twitch streamer who completed Elden Ring in only 2 and a half hours. No hits taken, no leveling up.

Ainrun has been doing no-hit speedruns of FromSoftware games since 2020, and his first attempt was with Dark Souls. After speedrunning through the entire Dark Souls trilogy and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the streamer comes pretty close to being defined a veteran.

In his recent Elden Ring playthrough he made sure to beat the first boss, Grafted Scion, because, according to the streamer’s opinion, skipping this fight disrupts the normal flow of the game.

As you all know, FromSoftware’s repertoire consists of notably super hard games to beat, with boss battles that will make you profusely hold your breath and rip your skin off in pure frustration (Manus, Malenia Blade of Miquella and Orphan of Kos are just a few good examples).

Apart from being very challenging, these soulslike titles are also pretty long. As I said earlier, it will take you a minimum of 50 hours to complete Elden Ring. But, if you’re yearning for 100% completion, be ready to put in approximately 130 hours of work to get all achievements, defeat secret bosses, acquire special items, and so on.

All this to say that Ainrun’s endeavor was truly a taxing and admirable one!