[Tobas]

I'm a novice at romhacking. but I was wondering how much knowhow would I have to have to hack in the script from the C64 version into the Famicom version.

[FAST6191]

Could be a modest amount, could be a lot. It will all depend upon how the things are coded. If both things are coded such that it is relatively painless* and as long as you know it is not going to be a weekend project and instead take a while then it could be a nice first project.

*no nasty encoding fun and games, the script lengths are suitable enough that you don't have to redo things, the scripts are suitably similar and have no major gaps (within games on the same console we see massive translation differences and sections dropped or added all the time), no fun with compression, fonts are sorted easily enough.

There are some things that you might be able to get through with effort in doing rather than understanding but not many. An example might be if the encoding is too tricky to convert but you can manually type things in then you could. I would not be caught doing that for more than about three paragraphs but as you can transcribe the average NES script in a casual weekend then yeah.

There are also things that would turn this from a nice, if rather long, first project into a nightmare one even for veteran hackers.

[cccmar]

From what I checked a while ago, Law of the West for the FC uses a somewhat annoying pointer table format. The zeroes are padding bytes, the low numbers represent pointers for the questions your character gets asked, along with the four possible responses, and the high numbers are for the pointers for the answer sets, from what I recall. The main issue is, there's not a lot of free space to use in there either, so it's likely you'd have to add compression of some sort, if possible (haven't looked into much detail there). I guess no one touched it also because, like you say, the game is available for other systems.