Battle Event: Locke and the Merchant/Officer

What if...since that part of the battle event with the clothes/sprite change seems to be hardcoded for character 01 (Locke), you load/swap character 01 back in right before the battle and give him the properties of Shadow as well as the graphics/palette/name? Then change it back to Shadow 100% afterwords, before the event is wrapped up. I might be missing something important that would prevent this from working, but it's all I can think of atm besides just removing the whole battle event, or ending it early or editing it to be a bit different so it doesn't look unfinished. But if my idea is executed correctly it should look rather seamless and work I'd imagine. Might have to work in a screen fade though maybe, when swapping the character ID...I'm unsure about that without trying it myself. It's an idea though!

I could try this (or rewrite the whole thing up to this point) with Shadow as actor $01. Wouldn't be TOO hard I suppose. It's way too late to see now, but I think he may already be character $01 outside of battles, because he acts as Locke does, so really I would just have to change which sprite was which and just change the palette for the overworld map and dog block (obviously) and that might work. And I thought I made progress.

Geiger's SNES9X debugger has a GUI, it's easy to use. I've seen a written tutorial somewhere online but I can't remember where.

Is that available on romhacking? I think I have that one, maybe I just forgot to try it. I'll look around for a tut if Nattak's plan doesn't work, or just when I have time.Thanks again for the quick replies.