Playing a Japanese game on English Windows Vista

I have never had this problem before with Japanese games in the past (although I have heard that others have), but when I load a Japanese game I recently downloaded it installs with a bunch of ???? and weird characters instead of the normal Japanese characters.

Thankfully it was pretty easy to figure out how to install.

But when I ran the game it didn't work properly. The game starts up okay, but when I begin a new game I can't advance any further than from the first scene.

A room appears and a message box appears (with no letters though) and a voice over triggers. After the voice over is done there is no way to proceed and clicking anywhere on the screen makes the game "not respond" and subsequently crash.

Any ideas for a fix? (Also installed the version of direct x that game with the game)

Thank you!

This was exactly what I was looking for and now my game works perfectly!