If you can't read Japanese, I think your in for a hard time. Some parts of the game ask you to bring XXX Team member to YYY location. Unless you do it exactly too the letter, the game won't advance the story. Even though Japanese copies Chinese writing, its still pretty darn hard to play Japanese games. At the very least I would recommend that you can recognize names of people, so that when a game refers to them, at least you know who they are talking about.