^Sounds to me like somebody should probably take the helm, and try bugfixing this game.
But nobody knows if there any experts in hacking Brownie Brown/1Up Studios games in here.
I wouldn't call myself an expert in that, since the obscurity of the developer is massive.
But, aheem, recently I prepared the ground to my Sword of Mana translation and I have some idea to share about what is wrong with the patch: SoM uses two byte value addresses for pointers without endstrings, but it does work beyond the boundaries using overflow to "gracefully" fall to the next step. So you have to take care when dumping and extracting texts.
That is one of the reasons I built my project "tabuada", so if someone have the time to look into the game, there you go.
