Not angry at you, glad you brought my attention to this, but this is absolutely maddening.
Before making my reply to you, I loaded up my local "deployment" copy of 1.0.6, and it was working fine, no invisible character.
I always have two copies of the "deployment/shipping" version of each game, zipped and unzipped. When I saw this post, I unzipped the same version, unlocked the gallery...and invisible character! Then I went back to the 1.0.6 that was working previously...invisible there too! I have no idea wtf is going on with this, it defies all explanation. Mezz is indeed set to invisible on game start so he doesn't appear over the intro, but that WASN'T CAUSING ISSUES JUST A MOMENT AGO. I love it when technology is possessed.
I also could have sworn I was manually forcing visibility for the character before starting the scenes with map elements, but it looks like I wasn't? Again, I feel like I'm going insane.
It's late now and I'll be busy tomorrow, but when I can I'll try to do that and see if it fixes this problem...until it decides to suddenly and inexplicably show up again.
EDIT: I THINK I have it fixed now, forcing transparency off at the start of the gallery menu seems to work and not break the intro. But now I'm superstitious, so I'm going to wait till tomorrow and check it again before uploading the revision.
I think what happened is that originally I didn't have the game itself set to start with character invisible, I just immediately toggled that on in the intro, but some time recently I started up the game, noticed there was still a flicker of Mezz in the intro, and wrongly assumed I had just forgot to set the game back to "start invisible" (this happens sometimes with the other games, as I'll turn it to "start visible" while testing things and then forget to toggle it back). I didn't realize when I did that that the game was "designed" to have Mezz visible on start, and not doing so broke things. That STILL doesn't explain how the one copy was magically working properly and then suddenly stopped however.
ALSO: Although I know you mean well, try not to tweak game operation with translation patches. This can potentially create overlap and weird bugs once I finally get around to fixing the problem, because we might "fix" things in different places in different ways, causing unexpected results when the two fixes are combined. I'll try to get the actual fixed version out promptly though so you don't have to wait long on me, hopefully within a day or two.