Anyone ever play a Japanese RPG with only a japanese to English dictionary?

[Zim]

It would be an utter nightmare. Don't do it.

I remember when I had only been learning Japanese for around two years or so and tried to play some rpgs (Tales of the tempest and A.S.H) in Japanese and it was such a hassle that instead of enjoying the games it simply turned into a laborious work exercise.

Firstly you won't just need a dictionary. You will also need a grammar dictionary. As simply knowing what the main words in a sentence are could still mean you get the opposite meaning.

If you don't read Hiragana/Katakana or any Kanji then looking things up you are simply going to have to go by how they look which will take an eternity.

I don't know how extensive the story mode in that game is, how much dialogue etc. However if there is even a reasonable amount and you want to actually understand the gist of things then it will be less like playing a game and far more like work.

If you do decide to go ahead with it then I would recommend downloading a program called Wakan. It's an utterly brilliant free Japanese - English dictionary for your computer.

EDIT: Am watching the video you posted. Kinda hard to tell how much dialogue etc is in the game from it. If most of it is just set menus then you can probably manage it as learning a limited amount of words is quite easy. I would strongly recommend learning Katakana though. You can learn it in a few days and it will allow you to read the foreign words put into Japanese. For example power becomes pawaa, Slide becomes suraido etc.