I want to pick this game up so I got ePSXe and, after some trouble getting the emulator to work at all, got it working (I had to change an overclock setting down to x1, hope that's okay for verification) and started it up with the English patched version. After naming Kai all text boxes in the game appear as black boxes with no text at all. I was wondering if anyone else had this issue when trying to use the English patch.

The default video plugin has that trouble, try installing Pete's OpenGL2 Driver. Or just change the main video plugin to Pete's OpenGL2 gpu core 2.0.0.

Changing the video plugin to Pete's OpenGL2 got the game working! I've got my notes and I'm ready to start doing attempts of Any%! Thank you very much tateragu :)