The Official M&L3 Ripping Project *WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS*

[Ridge Troopa]

Are you sure? My framerate is normal and I don't skip any frames, but his feet are always obscured by clouds when he lands... oh well, at least you have it so I'll just use that.

Dust clouds and other sprites will always obscure certain animations, so unless you want to rip the tiles you have to look for patterns in shape or whether a certain sprite is re-used elsewhere.

For the shadows: There is maybe a script which controls the shadows below the sprites, which makes them completely changeable. Maybe you can have one jump and several different shadow positions for it. I experienced the same with Secret of Mana.

Well, each different size of Battle shadow is a sprite/tile of its own (it's notable enough that I've been compiling a small sheet of them myself). If you compare base shadows between different sheets, you'll find that most characters around the same girth have identical shadows. Shadows in BIS almost always change size through tile swapping, and even then it's only when the character raises off the ground.

Overworld is a different story. There's probably less than 10 tiles used universally.