It definitely looks like you have the right location but I think you have the bit depth (graphics mode) off. Try EVERY single one in Tile Molester and fool with the alignment (+ and - on the numpad) and see if you can get anything. If not the font is most likely an 8x12 or a 12x12, which are fairly common in Japanese games, and you'll have to use FEIDIAN to dump it.

thanks a ton, Solid One! putting everything to 1 column helped me so much. I also found that the game randmoly mirrors the characters back and forth... like the numbers 0-9 were all mirrored, but then the letters A-Z started normal again... and then when I got to the Japanese, some were normal and some were mirrored... a lot of randomness so I had to keep switching back and forth, but I think I got all the relations so I can relative search now.

thanks to everyone who gave input or otherwise tried to help, hopefully I can actually make some progress now. I'll post again if I have anymore problems.

EDIT: well, based on how the characters were laid out when viewing in TileMolester, I got what I figured would be the relative order of the characters... but when I ran relative searches on various words found in the game, I either got no matches returned or got several matches and when going through every single one of them and changing a character and then going back into the game to see if it changed what I was looking at, I never saw any change to the word at all. I wonder what I'm doing wrong now...

to further explain, here are the exact steps I took:

1. opened ROM in Tile Molester and found the game's characters. I then numbered them from 0-230 based on the order of appearance to get this base relative reference sheet

2. I went into the game and selected a line of text that appears fairly early into the game so it would be a good reference point to check easily (I made sure it was dialouge and not menu, because I dunno if some menus might be graphically-composed)

3. using the previously obtained reference numbers, I ran a relative search on that line of text I chose for my testing

4. after getting the result list, I looked at each offset and changed the first character to be equal to the second character to see if when I went back to the same point in the game, the second character would now be doubled.

I tried the method with a few different words, but I never got any changes after going through all the returned results in each.

I first learned how to do this with a program simply called "Relative Search" but I also figured out that Transhexlation can do the same thing using Value Scan Relative (and is a lot more user-friendly) so I started using that as well. either way, I can't seem to get anything done on this particular game.

Seconding his good idea!  The values you're searching for aren't necessarily bytes.  Adding the wildcard in between may help you find them if they're short (i.e. int16) values.

With Translhextion's Value Scan Relative, just click the Skip Value button after each entry. (If you were doing a Scan Relative where you typed the actual word you were searching for, you could use an * to signify a wildcard.)

We're talking about the Value Scan Relative feature, though, which hasn't been duplicated anywhere else. I just mentioned the * wildcard for informational purposes.