I'm in the first town and every NPC walks around like they're the Flash and if they can't walk they move as though they're having a caffeine trip. Reducing the DOSBox cycle speed helps, but gameplay slows down to an absolute crawl doing so. Any way to solve this?

cycles=fixed 25000 works fine for me. Give it a try?

So that does work, sort of. But I also noticed that it also affects the framerate, so I think the animations themselves are tied to the framerate. I may have to just fiddle around a bit to find a sort of compromise point. Thanks.

The game also features a built-in system to speed it up or slow it down: press + (plus) to make it run faster or - (minus) to make it run slower.

You may also try setting the DOSBox "core" variable to "normal", "simple" or "auto" instead of "dynamic": this could be useful in some areas (mainly in town) but could affect negatively the game performance in some other areas (like in dungeons).