Romhacker J121 ported over the official SquareEnix screenplay from the GameBoy Advance release of “Final Fantasy V Advance” (2006) into the original game from 1992. This is a far superior translation than the earlier official release of FFV on the PlayStation (2001), and according to the project leader of the 1998 fan translation, it’s superior to their version, too. Here are supporting notes and files to work with this “GBA Script” hack.
(cc 17 June, 2024)
Last year I made a mistake when I replaced the first “?” with 🪃 when I added that icon to Nintenja’s Pixel Freemaster. The intro scene when the main character is unnamed showed him as “🪃🪃🪃🪃:” instead of “????:” and that was amusing to discover from player feedback versus on my own… 😅
So I’ve actually need to move the 🪃 somewhere else, restoring the “?” to $A2 (below “y”, above “so”) because it seems like a better solution than replacing all the “?” across the game’s entire menu system, to include description text. Tracking all those occurrences down would be a major headache.
Apparently J121 wasn’t daunted by doing something like this, because the fan translation that is modified for GBA Script used to have 2 “/” characters… the need for lots of compound letters in this hack must have motivated the quest to free up space and remove duplicate characters. It’s interesting that 2 “?” and “:” still remain, though!
(cc 29 Dec 2025)
Both of these TBL files are for use w the noisecross TextEditor, which offers a GUI to edit the FFV SNES rom!
The dialog font hacked in by J121 in their superb GBA Script port is seen here, and the 1bpp table file above is my attempt to map it for use editing this hack.
A common question from players using this awesome hack is— “can you make the font bigger?” and yes, yes I can. Thanks to learning a lot about fonts from Gens and FlamePurge, I’ve gained enough skills to modify the FFV SNES rom’s fonts. (See more here.)
In late December 2025 I brought over the fantastic font that Gens crafted for FF5r almost exactly one year ago. In early 2026 I’m now working w the noisecross TextEditor to fix the spacing in all of the text boxes. The game does not have any intelligent layout for the dialog boxes’ display— it just prints whatever it’s told to, and a resized font doesn’t fit the same way anymore.
Manually respacing all of the game’s dialog is tedious, but it’s somthing that I can pick up and put down easily, and it’s not a terrible way to clear my mind from other tedious work. So I’m steadily getting through it. The current progress file is at the end of these notes. You can open it with a regular word processing app, it’s a CSV file and each entry is on a new line (brilliant data architecture on the part of noisecross).