Quick and easy way to animate lots of text

So basically I'm creating a game with a significant amount of narration for my school project. The aim of the game is to prove that children do learn from narration based games. I am currently toying with several ways on how I can animate text to the screen. All I want is a text system much like final fantasy. Where a box on the bottom of the screen has text that appears in it. I've been looking around and have found no threads or tutorials on this and I was wondering if you folks have any advice? I could simply do it all in one huge block but beyond turning every letter into a symbol is there anyway I can animate lines of text at once? for a typewriter or similar effect? Thanks.