Update: I figured it out.
It turns out I had it right in the beginning. I never reloaded the save in JKSM so of course nothing was happening (ie I'm am idiot). Thank you all for the assistance.
100% sure I did. (Even did the whole process twice)
Granted, all I'm doing is replacing the character and class IDs and nothing else. Could that be the source of the issue?
Alright, so I was wrong and can't make heads or tails of this. Say I want to replace Nomah with Berkut. I simply search for his ID and replace it with Berkut's, yes? I tried that and nothing happened.
Hey, made an account to comment here. Despite a lack of experience, the hex editing seems simple, but my issue lies in FEST and FEAST - neither of them are working for me. FEAST has multiple errors (invalid startIndex, "This media is write protected") that prevent me from decompressing my save...
although i ended up accidentally changing my nand with no way of going back bc i didn't know you needed a gamecube controller to restore it (i have a wii minus/1.1, which doesn't have gamecube controller support)
and if i find the sd card i have my NAND backed up on, i can not only restore the NAND if i solder the right part in, but i can also put my NAND on dolphin, then i can play dolphin online, like PMEX Remix or MKWii Riibalanced