Submitted time is in-game time, imo this makes the most sense as a timing method since there's no autosplitter that can pause during loading, which means real time depends somewhat on differences in hardware quality and being able to load quickly. The real time duration of this run is 4:08:02 from file start to last input, so yeah there's a lot of loading (and a few cutscenes which I think are also untimed?)
Noctis difficulty, most recent version of the game as of 2022-03-13.
Honestly there's a lot of room for improvement still. Setting aside small mistakes, a significant amount of time is spent gathering health / skill points to power up for the lategame boss gauntlet. Being fast and consistent at the late game bosses would allow a lot of trimming of the route to remove non-mandatory pickups. Basically what I'm saying is someone else better go beat this :p
(also yes, the game crashes once during this run. it doesn't impact IGT and I retimed realtime since the livesplit is not fully accurate)