I think you owe it to yourself to relearn chocobo's dungeon 2 on the Japanese version. I know you probably don't want to, but given it's one of your favourite games I can't imagine the idea there are "faster" runs out there will sit well with you in the long term. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult, you'll just need to work out a system for memorizing the names of things. Maybe memorizing the first and last symbol in the words and having a cheat sheet or something.