@ Kenryoku_Maxis
I've played through VII twice (89 hours and 71 hours) and, to be honest, most of what you're complaining about never affected me. I don't remember ever being put in a difficult position regarding grinding, and I've never had any issues balancing the job system and the shard system. I see VII as a DQ that contains more of everything. More battles, a longer story, more areas to explore, more dungeons to conquer...sure the pacing was incredibly slow and losing party members without much notice was slightly annoying, but the game itself, at least to me, functioned much like any other DQ that came before it, just on a much larger scale.
If anything, IX is the oddball. A shortened main storyline and a heavy emphasis on timewasters such as quests and treasure grottoes? I'm pretty sure that it's the first mainline game where players are expected to spend more time on non-story oriented post-game content than they do on the main quest. I enjoyed the game immensely, but if any DQ game should be called an oddball, it should definitely be IX IMHO.
