After talking with the innkeeper within the Laughing Sea Gal, the fight with the Alastor begins. The first time I played through this was no problem, it looked like any other boss/mini-boss type fight with normal animations.

Every single time after this, though, my alternate characters only saw the character of the Alastor wooden stiff, floating in air, yet still attacking and disappearing, attacking and disappearing, etc.

The normal trash mobs animate as normal, but the Alastor is just this wooden, non-animated placeholder of a boss. Looks horrible. and harder to fight I might add.