How to extract text files of the script from a Playstion 2 Visual Novel game
In this case I am opening Aria the Origination for PS2, which is developed by Alchemist. I assume that you can use the same process for other Alchemist games. It's also likely that it will work on other VNs for PS2, and maybe even VNs for other systems, like PS1 or PSP. I'm using Windows 7.


First, extract everything from the iso of the game (I used 7zip). You will then see various files and folders. There is an executable, in this case it's "SLPM_550.14". That file contains the bulk of the game's code, and also some uncompressed menu text that is viewable in a hex editor that can view Shift-JIS encoding (I used MadEdit).
The MOVIE folder contains the game's video files. The AFS files contain compressed images, sounds, and text.

You can open AFS files using AFS explorer (if it doesn't work in AFS explorer 3.7, try 3.4). MAC.AFS contains the text files, so extract them. You will then see .BIP files, which are compressed with LZSS, and can be extracted with HCGCONV. If HCGCONV refuses to load, you may need to download some system files, which you can get from Microsoft.

In HCGCONV, click on "test LZ decode" in the options menu, type "4" in the first text box and then select the BIP files and hit "(S)". The files will then be decompressed and you can open them in a text editor that can view Shift-JIS encoding (I used Notepad++). Then you can delete everything that's not text, add new lines where control codes are by using find and replace, and do whatever you want from there.