After checking the extracted bss files with a hex editor I did see some readable text, so the files are to be extracted like any other, I've implemented your conversion code into the tool I'm working on, it works, but the result isn't very clean, a bunch of nulls and other unicode chars inbetween some strings, I'm not seeing anything in your code to handle those so I'm guessing the conversion of the loc files has the same "issue". I'd assume those might be some characters with special behavior in-game like setting colors, showing certain icons, etc, wouldn't know for sure without testing.