Unbreakable

Here are the notes that I've been making so far.  Some things echo Nattak, some entirely disagree:

-Before Whelk:
-Clearly you are easing into the difficulty, which may be good.
-Mammoths using Blizzard early is nice.

-Whelk:
-You didn't really increase the difficulty, just the length of the fight.
-Weakening my attacks or increasing his HP is probably fine, but both at once makes this way too long, especially for the first boss fight.
-All of his attacks do borderline pointless damage, especially given the higher starting HP.
-It's barely worth expending effort to avoid Mega Volt, even, since it's not going to kill anyone unless the player falls asleep on the A button.

-Auto-dash:
-While giving Sprint Shoes right at the start is better than vanilla, do you have a reason for not using the auto-dash patch (or the patch for dashing with the B button)?
-I understand that you may want a tradeoff here, but this seems to me like the wrong tradeoff to make.  I want to make decisions based on which Relic will help me win.  I don't really like having a tradeoff between comfort and chance of winning.  The only times in the game where this makes an interesting strategic choice are during the timed segments, but those are few and far between, so they're not worth balancing around.

-Terra in the Mines:
-I feel like it's a bad choice to let the enemies here use Slow inducing specials.  It's not fun waiting thirty seconds for Terra to get a turn.
-If you want to remove Slow and keep the same difficulty, just double the enemy damage output.  I think this would be a large improvement in this case.

-Moogle fight:
-Good, robbing Mog is worthless now.
-Other than that, it's business as usual.

-M-tek Armor
-Okay, this one is actually a fight.
-The nerfs to the Autocrossbow and Bio Blaster are definitely warrented.

-Cave of South Figaro:
-A bit of a wake-up call in terms of needing status healing Items/protection.
-It's feeling like the Ice spell is completely worthless right now.   Maybe give something here an Ice weakness?
-I like how you can Steal status healing Items from the enemy that sets the status (Echo Screens from the Leafers, Antidotes from the Hornets).  I hope that trend stays consistent.  It works out nicely in this cave since it allows the dungeon to shout "Hey, status effects are a thing, you may want to buy status healing Items in the next town", while preventing the player from getting stuck due to lack of status healing Items.  The relative shortness of the cave also helps.

-Mt. Kolts:
-I like that you removed Cure from Terra.  It's more fun to use her as a Black Mage than to save MP for out of battle healing.
-It seems like a lot of the difficulty in this hack is going to come from managing resources.
-No battle here is hard on its own, really, but I used every single Tonic, Potion and Dried Meat that I had to get through this dungeon, and I had to play carefully to avoid running out.
-It's cool that Locke seems to be getting use as a fighter during this portion of the game.  In most hacks physically attacking with him here is almost a waste of time.

-Lete River:
-After a complete lack of changes to enemy names, suddenly seeing "HappySquid" is pretty funny.
-Enemies in random encounters with Silence specials are nice to prevent Banon's Health from trivializing this segment.
-It seems a bit unfair that a pair of Pterodons can effectively murder Banon outright if they both drop a Fireball on the same turn.  I think if you made Fireball a timed attack you could prevent them both from using it on the same turn. I'm not sure if you want to change this, since usually the player can take advantage of Confuse or keep Terra's turn constantly ready to slip in a heal between them.
-Ultros plays mostly the same as before, except now he casts Mute on Banon and Edgar is worthless.  One downside to the Mute casting here is that the fight could become slightly ridiculous if the player never bought any Echo Screens (or used them all on the Lete River).  And there's no way to go back and buy them if the player only has one save file at the last save point on the river.  I'm not sure what to do about this.  If there was a way to backtrack from the Lete River's Save points this would be totally fine (since the player should have effectively been warned to buy status healing Items), but in this case that may not be enough because this could potentially cause somebody to have to redo the entire game up to this point if they aren't prepared.

-Terra's scenario:
-Still short and easy, but I barely survived against the checkpoint encounter (I triggered it deliberately).  Doesn't help that I got a Back Attack there.

@"Gi Nattak" I disagree that making it harder to run from encounters is "a cheap way to increase the difficulty". I wouldn't like the idea of players being able to run through dungeons without fighting anything and then grind somewhere right next to an Inn to make up for it. I think making running harder and/or more expensive is a valid design decision.