Back in the late 90's, my friend and I learned a decent amount of Japanese between 2 college courses, and a lot of JP gaming. Tons of Japanese PS1/PS2/Saturn games all had menus that were pretty much in English... as Katakana. Made it through many an RPG with a Kanji dictionary close at hand.
We did have a hell of a time powering through one of the Breath of Fire games, where a near endgame dungeon had a statue that said something, then kept throwing us down a pit towards the start of the dungeon over, and over, and over, before we finally figured out the translated text the statue was saying was "Patience is a virtue." The path opened while we were standing there translating the text and we flipped the fuck out.
I think the story we made up for FFVII & FFT was better when we didn't fully understand the text.
Brave Fencer Musashiden was pretty painful to get through some of the quests without 30 min pauses to translate, but I really enjoyed the "game" of puzzling out translations.