Unbreakable

Just fired it up for a bit, one thing I notice off the bat is all the characters names are in caps, but Biggs is not. Is there some reasoning behind this or are the rest still to come?

The Whelk fight, while lasting a lot longer, especially with slow being applied to the characters and no way to remove it, really didn't offer any more challenge other than the occasional attack by the shell now, but as far as I can tell he (the Whelk head) only used battle and special. You can expand the ROM with FF3usME to 4MB and use the battle script expansion patch it offers to give some more script options for even the most simplest boss like the Whelk, just to spice things up more.
This IS the first boss though and early on, I understand.

Ok, moving on...

The Marshal on the other hand beat me down, so I redid the whole sequence and fought the monsters this time and they were a lot more damaging, lost one party to monsters then had a team of Mog with 2 dead, so used my last Moogle party for the Marshal, put them all in the back row and focus-fired the Marshal. It was a tougher battle for sure, quite difficult indeed to keep my guys alive with very limited healing options - it's tough Stealing the healing items from the monsters prior to the boss battle for much needed healing when they are beating you down so much lol - the Vomammoth seems to be doing a bunch more damage with his 100% chance of Blizzard as his first move, killing them hopefully before they get that off became a high priority instead of stealing from them. That one Moogle's brush weapon that cast slow was a life saver I think for the Marshal.

Having Terra come with Sprint Shoes is nice, but begs the question why not just apply the Dash with B Patch if your intention was to give the player sprinting from the start? This would of course free up the Relic for something else, which is cool.

After that, the desert was alright. More regular poison attacks I think but luckily Antidotes were dropping and I had an unusual more amount of Sleeping Bags than normal, which was good.

Magitek Armor battle, they damaged plenty but nothing one couldn't handle so that's good. I like how Edgar has more HP like a tank it definitely helps. I managed to slam one with Locke's Mirager desperation attack when he got put into Near Fatal and I already inputted Fight, so that was a nice surprise.

Monsters in the Cave... first off it seems that every single monster/battle so far I've noticed has the 'harder to run from' flag applied to it, is there a reason behind this other than just making it harder to run from every single monster? IMO I feel it's a cheap way to increase the difficulty and I found it a bit frustrating and hilarious at the same time watching my characters run in place getting owned cause they cannot escape a 'Crawler' monster lol. I see a lot of monsters are using their specials right off the bat, which is kinda tedious at this point in the game when no Relics are available to prevent the flood of status effects these monsters use, and the castle is of course where you can buy items is under the sand. So one would have to have prior knowledge of these monsters before completing that event, or they will suffer. Got hit with 2 petrifies in a row as well from the Bleary, I did buy Soft though and lots of Antidotes at the castle lucky me, but I ran out half way into the cave. The cave isn't too bad though because of the Recovery Pool of course, so I just hung out there and leveled up a few times until the monsters were more bearable - I couldn't imagine a speed runner doing this however lol. So many status effects early on right at the start of battle with no way to prevent it is pretty cheap instead of a fair-hard difficulty, in my opinion. The cave monsters felt tedious, in other words, perhaps a variable check could be added in the script for 'if party member is already effected by X status, do something else'. I realize the monsters are not the brightest, but spamming there stats inflicting spells over and over even on people already effected seemed kinda...yeah.

This all being said, it IS definitely more challenging thus far and one surely cannot just hold turbo and attack down and expect to win, which from what I understand is a huge part of this mod, so good job there. And I've yet to experience most of what this mod has to offer. Anyways I will report back after I get my characters all pimped out with gear and scale the mountain.