I decided to take a brief look at this game for you.

You can find some text at A5:EEE5(0x12eee5 pc offset).

I took the location of '0' in the font and traced it back in the code. The characters are DMA'd straight from the ROM to VRAM. However, the information to do this is stored in a table in RAM.

There is a table that is built in RAM  from the current text block that contains the offset of each character following by how many bytes to transfer it thus supporting 8x16 and 16x16 characters.

So, then I went farther back to see where that data came from. It led back to A5:EEE0. The'0x80' there is directly linked to the '0' character.  It doesn't seem like your text is compressed, however there is some sort of processing going on there. I didn't get to spend much time with it, so I'm not certain what format the text is stored in and exactly what's going on. Play around with it and you'll see. The values there are almost like tile offsets, but not really. It's also easy to crash the game depending on what value you change it to. I was also able to make it load Kanji while i was playing around with changing the values.

Experiment some and maybe you'll notice some things.


P.S. $80/FA4C is the code offset where this 0x80 character is loaded from a5:eee0 if anybody else is interested.