Star Ocean: First Departure

[educatedbum]

So, I used a patchwork of the settings suggested in this thread, and this game ran really well (with the above mentioned non-gamebreaking issues), but once I hit the Van continent, the game started to freeze a TON in battle.

Does anyone know what's causing this or how I can somehow address it? I'm using the 64 bit version 9.8 btw, with the following settings:

-Non-buffered Rendering
-Vert Cache
-Disable Stencil Test
-I/O on thread
-Filters turned off
-Texture filtering on Nearest or Linear

Thanks for any suggestions!