@Divk
@Liker. This was indeed the problem. But I discovered another unusual bug when testing this. I fought Asmal as a dragon snapper to take away most of his HP, when I ended the transformation and hit the ~ key to sprint to prepare to finish Asmal off, the game crashed -- it completely exited to the desktop with no error message. I tried again, and it crashed again. Figuring it might be a RAM issue, I closed all non-essential applications running the background, but this did not resolve the issue as the game crashed again.
(I beat Asmal by running away as a dragon snapper before transforming back so I did not need to sprint -- and indeed received the armor when he died).