Alright, two things:
There is no substitute for Tokimeki Memorial Hospital. It’s better to just play it in japanese, not knowing what the heck anyone is saying, than to play something else in english for a “tokimeki memorial hospital experience”
Timothy Rogers’ video has two hours of “let’s play”, where as he says he is “playing it so you don’t have to”.
But then again, since every playthrough is different, you may still want to play it and see what your outcome is.
A fan translation won’t magically appear, until the day it does. Until then you may just have to play it in Japanese, fumbling around, or…. Just not play Tokimeki Memorial Hospital at all.
An idea I just had, and what I would do: Set up a Virtual Keyboard for Japanese on your computer, and type the first couple characters of each text box into a script translation guide.
Back in my day, I was playing Mother 3 with a translation guide on my 3rd gen monochrome iPod screen. The text files had to be split into something incredible small like 55kb or something, and so I had it in 300 parts. I still cried at the ending. I was on the starmen dot net forums and, if I had made a thread asking for what to do if you Can’t Read Japanese and Want to Play Mother 3, most of the games that are actually similar to Mother 3 weren’t even in the mother fandom’s consciousness yet, games like Chulip or Gunman’s Proof (which IDEK if that was translated yet). The closest we were aware of at the time was Contact for DS. A lot of recommendations here are about as good a substitute as Contact is for Mother 3. Still good games worth playing, but not a substitute by any stretch.
Unless you have already picked up Tokimeki Memorial Hospital and played it in Japanese and still have an ache to talk to those creatures… In which case, sure, play Doki Doki Literature club or something.
