If you have a working .sav file for tsuukin hitofude, you can just copy it over as the same name for the polarium advance.sav, the format is exactly the same. So if you were x amount of stages into tsuukin hitofude, and you'd rather play it in english, just copy the .sav file over and you can continue where you left off and play in english now.
If you have no working .sav file, or you want a fresh one so you can set the start date, and you want to use VBA 1.7.2 with it, simply boot it up in VBA 1.8.0 beta 3, which will initialize a VALID .sav file, then exit. Move the .sav over to the VBA 1.7.2 battery folder, and play away.
I must say I really like this game, enough so that I've worked through about 300+ puzzles to gold star level so far, though I agree it could use more bells and whistles, and maybe some more puzzles too. I seem to remember once when I was poking around with the values in the .sav in tsuukin hitofude, I got it to show a total of 366 puzzles instead of 365, I'm assuming because it was accounting for the extra day in a leap year. I might be remembering wrong, or maybe it did show 366 and one of the puzzles repeats, I'm not sure. When I finally get up to 365 I'll start experimenting again to see.