[Xanato]

I have done as you suggested and succeeded, Vehek. There's an output file now, but it's filled with countless instances of "Position: (random gibberish)." How do I make sense of this (if at all possible)?

[BlackDog61]

1 - don't run it on the ISO, run it on the extracted file. (As well spotted & re-stated by KingMike.) Have you done that?
2 - get familiar with Japanese, enough to recognize "garbage" from potentially meaningful Japanese. (Ex: kanji are often intermixed with hiragana/katakana. And punctuation is common in sentences - even if it is different from English punctuation.) Then take the time to browse the entire dumped files and look for "the real thing". (Google translate can help verify stuff makes sense, sometimes but not always.) You could try and look for actually existing game messages you've seen on screen, if you take good care not to mistake one kanji for another, and it you choose a sequence that doesn't involve English characters (just in case - we don't know how they are encoded and you chose to not dump ASCII).

Just for comparison, if relative search doesn't work, then you should be browsing the entire extracted files.

EDIT - I forgot to mention that you have to set the encoding to SJIS when you browse the dumped files.(Ex: in Notepad++, just after opening the file and without typing anything in it, menu->encoding->character sets->Japanese->SJIS)

[Xanato]

Should I put SJIS Dump and the output file in the same folder as the extracted file or does it not matter? If I do have to put them in the same folder as the extracted file(s), will that have a negative effect on the ability of the game to function/be modded on my PC?

[BlackDog61]

You can do as you want. It willonly change the contents of the command you run - since you have to give the path to the file.
It's probably easier for you if you "move the program" into the directory before you execute the command?

None of this affects your ability to edit the game in any way. In fact, having adump of the text doesn't give you ability to edit it, it only helps find which files have text inside. (And that is step 1 to anything else.)

[Xanato]

When I asked about the possibility of it negatively impacting the game, I meant more along the lines of having a foreign file mixed among sensitive game data. I was concerned that, should I ever choose to test any modifications by running the game, the game would not function properly due to the presence of such content. I know that changes to a text dump will not be reflected in a game.

What type of folder/file should I be checking for the text? What size would the file most likely be? So far, I know that the STR folder has movies and the XA folder has audio.