Translating a japanese PS game

Hello, this could be considered a request for help, but please hear me out. I am not very computer savvy, but a friend gave me this:

Okay took a quick look and there's good news and bad news.

The good - only one image file in the game and thats the text used for name entry. So that means all the other stuff is in plain text, including character names and menus (I hope, unless they're counted as 3d objects which I'll verify later).

The bad - I can't make heads or tails of the file structure nor their interdependence at first glance. But I'll take my sweet time tomorrow afternoon since I have nothing to do until tuesday. I can't really pick out dialouge text - yet but again I'll look carefully and report patterns ASAP.

It'd be nice to have some people with more hacking experience onboard. I looked at the Tales of Phantasia project page for clues but they seem to keep everything to themselves, so if I can't figure out this stuff the next step would be to beg for assistence.

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And that's why I'm here. If you guys feel like it, please get the game and tinker with it. We could really use some help with this.

Game: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MR6DLFGD

Forum: http://z3.invisionfree.com/Phoenix_Translations/index.php?

Hacking an exe with a hex editor is way beyond my skill.  Hex editors usually have an option to automatically highlight and convert bytes representing text to readable text.  You'd have to figure out how they do this and probably write an equivalent feature to automatically find japanese text.  Hopefully these text finding features are not as sophisticated as comparing strings to an English dictionary -- maybe it is something simple like looking for a long sequence of bytes that are predominately in a certain range (e.g. 99$ of plain ascii text would be between 0x61 and 0x7A).

To figure out the encoding used in the game you could search for one of the character's names (or something else distinctive) in various different encodings.