Curious to know if my idea would work better as an "outfit" or something else?

Hi again, So I've been brainstorming this Pokemon game - and something that I really wanted was to have your starter follow you the whole game, but a snag I hit with that - is that I couldn't really get it to act out in "cutscenes" like I wanted (unless I had all those moments exist in the same map where you'd get him set up)

But recently, I've been thinking about doing things in a "Banjo-Kazooie"ish manner, and have him just hanging on to your head.

And right now, it's an Outfit right now, but the game plan is to have him change outfits so when the starter wanted to hop off and do things during certain moments. Or in instances like underwater segments, it will trigger a temporary dependent in the map to follow you.

So doing this, I feel like I get to have him outside in the world, and I'd even have the option to have partner trainer moments which would be nice. And I also think it's kind of adorable and I can probably have a lot of fun with npcs commenting on your head gear.

But there is a problem here that I have with it. Mainly, I'd have to make a ton of outfits and I haven't really touched on how it would work with things like the bike and well, I was also considering maybe trying to wrap my head around the script stuff to try and copy the surf code by having Popplio drawn onto the player at certain times but I'm not really to sure about how that's going to work out either.

Anyone know which of these sounds like it would help me get what I want here?