A lot of what's on the cards themselves is just English transcribed as hiragana. My kana recognition skills suck dead donkeys through a straw, but here's what I've been able to decipher:
In the box with HP/### at the top, the kana in the second line (beside the card number) are just a transcription of the character's name into hiragana: on card 01 they read Se-ru-ji-(u)--"Serge". The line below the field circles is e-re-me-n-to--"Element(s)". The elements themselves are harder to figure out, since they're dragging some stuff that isn't transcribed English into the mix. On 01, the first is indecipherable (the characters are e-tsu-ku-nu-kiri, and "kiri" is written with a kanji that indicates it means cut or slash, but "e-tsu-ku-nu" has me completely baffled), the second is fu-ri-i-zu--"freeze", probably, and the third is re-e-za-a--"laser", I would guess.
The yellow box on the lower left is labelled "Special rules" (tokushu ru-u-ru). Unfortunately, it uses kanji, which are a lot tougher to identify than kana. On card 01, I
think the first line just says "Serge is everyone's leader", and the second line refers to him getting +100
a-tsu-hu on his first turn, whatever atsuhu is (it could also be "atsupu" or even "atsubu"--I can't tell whether that little mark near the upper-right of the last character is a diacrit or just a smudge--but none of them suggest anything to me).
The line across the top says, in part, (c)1999 Square Character Design: (c)1999 Square, but the four kanji on the upper right are too small for me to see them clearly (and have no furigana, which means I need a stroke count to have a hope in hell of figuring out what they say. I'd bet on a proper name).
Using Guile's card (#39) as a control...
Lower right box: Alf (A-ru-fu in katakana), "elements" below the field effect again. The elements themselves are to-u-so-o-do (probably [something] Swords. Ten Swords? If this is WandaSwords, Serge's first element could be his "Dash and Slash" tech...except that it has the wrong element colour. X-Strike is a red, though. Or the elements may not match the real Cross elements at all), re-tsu-do-a-a-su (??? no idea whatsoever, except for the vague possibility that "doaasu" might be "doors"), te-to-ki-shi-n ("tokis(h)in" might be "toxin", i.e. poison. "te" is Japanese for "hand", among other things. Hmmm.)
Lower left box: Still labelled "Special Rules".
First line: hito(hito)[man--is this repeated or not?] o {odoro[surprise] ka-se-ru}[verb unit?] sugo[kanji from "sugoi"=weird/amazing] ude[ability] no matsu[look forward to?] tsuyan: I have no idea what this really says, although I'd bet on something resembling "International Man of Mystery"
It took me a looooooong time to figure out what the "odoro" character was--the first furigana could easily have been a, ne, or re as well as o. In any case, it seems to be a description of the character rather than anything to do with the card as such.
The second line is almost identical to Serge's, except that it says he gets +50 atsupu (I'm almost certain now that the last character is a "pu") on his first turn. Wild guess: "atsupu" could be a very weird abbreviation for "attack points" (ATP). The rules may shed more light on this.
Conclusions: larger scans of the bottoms of the cards (big enough to clearly ID furigana and tell how many strokes are in unfamiliar kanji) would make this easier. In order to make the game playable, we probably only need to translate the rules and the second line of each "special rules" box (not even that, really, if they're all of the "+X atsupu on first turn" variety). And my Japanese really does suck--two cards took me most of the morning.
