ROM Hack [Request] for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Echoes of Time DS word-censor

[3-I]

This is a dumb thing to have to ask, and I'm sorry.

I love this game a lot. It's one of my favorites, and I'm itching to play it again. The only problem is that there's a particular word in the text in a few places that causes a PTSD flareup panic attack in me. (It's the name of a particular kind of undead whose name starts with a Z, popular from the Walking Dead. Please don't say that word to me. I suffer a lot when I see it.)

Can anyone do a real quick hack that just... takes that word out? Changes the dialogue so it doesn't use it? I would do it myself, but, A, I don't know how, and B, if I see the word it causes a panic attack. Just replacing it with another word that makes sense (like dead) would be plenty, or rewriting those lines of dialogue to avoid it. Even just blanking those textboxes so I don't see the contents. Anything.

Eternal gratitude to anyone who's willing. I assume if you know how to edit the text in games like these--people must, since that's how translation works--it should be no more than a few hours work, and it'd mean the world to me to not have to be on edge while playing this game.

 

[FAST6191]

A curious request, though not as curious as me concerning the origin and mechanics of such a phenomenon. Avoidance is an odd strategy but if it works for you then so it goes.

I lack the time to fiddle right now but if an aspiring hacker wants a little starter project to show someone else as a portfolio when attracting a translator it would not be a bad one.

Generally speaking you would have to find the text and its encoding (a lot of DS games from Square Enix use fairly common ones).
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/513/ being a nice basic search option if it is not going to be boring ASCII or something.
Compression is a possibility but it is likely fairly basic LZ. https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/826/ or dsdecmp will handle happily in batch form, and compress it again afterwards.
Normally you could expect pointers to be a fun one (in the overwhelming majority of cases games will have lists of values the game uses to determine length of lines/text sections rather than automatically doing it, change a word length and everything beyond that gets shifted back or forth by the difference which is a very quick way to break things) but if you can find a 6 letter substitute then a simple find and replace should be possible.

You would presumably have to find every edge case as well, especially if the cost of failure is not a typo report. Fortunately the plural should not be so bad and capitals not so bad either. I don't know if the characters react at some point (most games I have seen from SE just have such things as a basic fodder character rather than any kind of central theme but I have not played this one long enough to see here) and accordingly stylise the text.
You might also have to repeat for the bestiary.

 

[3-I]

Thankfully, I don't believe they exist as creatures in the bestiary or gameplay. They just come up in dialogue once or twice.