A regretful abandonment in this case -- I somehow stumbled upon a bug in this game that crippled my ability to play the game reasonably anymore. Essentially, I had been running from fights that were either too easy or just frustrating and not worth the time for awhile and had built up an unusually high counter value for running.

I don't know if the bug is relative to that value, but when I was at sea, there was a point where I would start getting encounters every couple seconds and it was physically impossible to run from any of them anymore -- not because I'd taken advantage of the ! feature and was incapable of running. These were prompts that I should have been able to run from that would drop me right into battle without any hesitation, and with about ten times the frequency of the encounter-plagued sea travels of Suikoden IV.

The rest of the game up to that point had actually been fairly fun, but I'll probably never play this again. A shame.