It might help if you tried opening the file using one of the Japanese tables we have on hand - here's
Shift-JIS, and here's
EUC.
The data starting at $8D2 looks promising:
45 FF 46 46 45 43 54 5F 54 41 A2 47
This comes out to:
E($FF)FFECT_TA($A2)G
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is your smoking gun.
You'll also see it earlier at $314:
FF 5A 59 55 55 4E 49 4E 4E 7A
Which is:
($FF)ZYUUNINN($7A) ("Juunin", likely 獣人 or "beastman")
See how "FF" precedes strings of precisely eight non-gibberish characters? It's compression flags.
Let's have a look at that 7A. In binary, that's 01111010: that is, each bit tells the decompressor which of the following sequences should be treated as plaintext and which should be treated as compression codes. In FF, the bits are all set (i.e. 1), so we can assume that 0 indicates a compression code.
After it comes this sequence:
B2 1E 41 52 49 41 F7 0F 45 BC 2E 05
Or:
($B2)($1E)ARIA($F7)($0F)E($BC)($2E)($05)
If every compression code is two bytes, then this pairs up nicely with our compression flags:
0 - ($B2)($1E)
1 - A
1 - R
1 - I
1 - A
0 - ($F7)($0F)
1 - E
0 - ($BC)($2E)
And what of that mysterious 05 at the end? That's the compression flags for the
next block!
Now. Without seeing what all this decompresses
to, I really can't help you much further than this, but each of those compression codes comprises a "length/distance" pair - that is, they encode one value that tells the decompressor how far to look back for the next bit of data, and another that tells it how many bytes from that point to copy. Hopefully you can puzzle it out from here.