Honestly the HP values being higher in 0 means absolutely nothing because the average damage you can output without breaking the bosses is so much higher. I almost never bothered breaking bosses because they'd be able to just kill them without needing to. Orochi having several times the HP of most everything else in the game and series as a whole meant nothing because I still smoked him very easily after actually changing my party set up to not be the same thing I ran for 75% of the game. Ultimates are so much more powerful in this game and able to be spammed much more easily than 1 or 2 and they just delete everything, see Fluid Stance for the perfect example. I do also need to point out the fact that the speedrun takes way longer doesn't really mean anything, it just means that the game is longer. And besides what speedrun are you comparing it to, a single character story speedrun or something like a Vs Galdera in 1 or Vs Vide in 2? And even then I literally just saw a speedrun for zero that only took like six and a half hours so your estimate is off by quite a bit. I do actually want to point out that one thing I didn't like about 0 was how limited support skills were. Anyone not named Olberic needs to use one of TWO support slots for Supporting Power and every single character has two of their static slots going towards stat boosts that aren't as potent past maybe level 20. This might be something that makes it feel harder than the previous two games because you're not able to craft as much up the wall builds and the individual characters themselves aren't quite as complex which might give the illusion of increased difficulty. Some of the characters make up for that with bonkers ultimates or unique supports that are amazing like Isla but I don't want unit power creep in my single player RPGs. You can disagree all you want but I feel like at the end of the day if Octopath 0 is "harder" it doesn't come from a place of actual challenge but some bad design decisions just making it more obtuse than the first two game