Coding a 2D JRPG?

I don't know anything about C game or gui libraries, I'll figure it out as I need to. I don't want to use a very complicated library, but I do want something that is maintained, Linux native, and portable to at least Windows 7.

I don't want to use an existing engine, and given the simplicity of 2D (with possible exceptions for parallax scrolling), I don't think I will need one.

I don't need tools to edit assets and data, they already exist for the games themselves. That said I should make them easy to modify. Maybe store them in simple format. Plain text, possibly SQL databases, upscaled PNGs for image assets, maybe a way to convert midi scores + instruments into lossless audio.

The actual battle and event scripting modules I'll probably convert them to bytecodes that the scripting modules can interpret. Should make it very easy to debug. Maybe add an option to "compile" these event scripts so the interpretor can skip some steps. I want this to be very tight, something that can fit in a 2 MB level 2 cache.

I would reuse parts of the modules as much as possible, with sub modules you can switch out for thing unique to each game. Thus you could hack the FF5 job system to FF6 with far less effort than it would take for assembly language. Same deal with extending the scripting systems, upscaling art assets, improving music, and so on.

So ideally you could use the existing FF rom hacking tools and export your changes (or rip soneone elses rom hack), you could rip it all out and start from scratch using PC specific tools like GIMP/Audacity (the scripting would just be plain text), or both.

Parallax scrolling might require its own tool, depends on what the interpretors allow and if its easy to preview in-game.

What do you think of this method?