My favourite mainline DQ game for the longest time was IX. The ability to play the whole game co-op and the customization was great. The lack of personality for the MC is alleviated with being able to build your team however you want. Post game has a lot of story quests that ties up loose ends and are quite rewarding.

That said, DQXIS is truly one of the best games I've ever played. I was debating for the longest time which was better, but after finally finishing the true ending, I can definitively say that XI is my favourite now. The story and characters are really good, and those customization is not as expansive as IX, the need to grind to no tomorrow makes it manageable. Plus all the QoL features added in the DE version removes a lot of minor issues that has never been fixed in the series

I've only played 8 and 9, and 8 is one of my favorite games overall, I'd say it's in the top3. I really like 9 but the characters in your party being blank slates really hurts the game for me and the quests to get some of the jobs are really tedious. I have 11 S but I still haven't got around to play it, though it seem to be more similar to 8 than 9 so I think I'll love it.

DQ9, because its the only one I have played.
I got DQ8 for PS2, maybe I will 0lay it someday.

XIS is so, so good. It's everything great about Dragon Quest done to a high polish. It's one of the best games ever made.

VIII is also an amazing game, and one I hope gets a HD re-release at some point. V had one of the best storylines and it's a shame it didn't get a first-time release on the SNES stateside. It would have been up there with FF6, FF4, Chrono Trigger, and SMRPG.

The whole series is great. I started with the first game on the NES. Dragon Quest is the series that I've stuck with the longest other than Mario and Zelda.

XI is just too damned good. It does everything that VIII did but throws in a ton of QoL improvements that take what little tedium was remaining in the JRPG genre out. DQ11 has about 5 story sections that just blew my mind when seeing them. They are...

VIII but that's the only one I seriously played. I started older entries but didn't stick with them long enough.

I'm only wondering if I'll like XI as much when I eventually try it. I loved VIII, but I don't know if that type of game will draw me in now. I could play VIII again for the nostalgia, beautiful world and music.

XI would probably have the beauty and music of the original with more contemporary tech, but it would lack the nostalgia factor for me and the gameplay is fairly standard.

Each Dragon Quest game (except 8) has a unique element about it. The first three might not seem unique in today’s context, but these were the first games (at least the first noteworthy games, as it’s possible some obscure Apple Lisa or PET game no one played did similar stuff) to do what they did when they did it.

Dragon Quest 5 is my favourite of these. You begin as a kid going around the world with your father. Then you grow up and adventure as a young adult, and you can romance a wife, then have kids, and adventure with your kids. I really enjoyed that formula for a game, and the way the plot weaves into that was really interesting. I’m at a dilemma, because some of the really interesting elements of the game also happen to be spoilers.

Dragon Quest 9 provided the first multiplayer RPG experience that I felt topped Secret of Mana. While I am not particularly a fan of Secret of Mana as a single player game, it tends to be very underrated because of how excellent it is as a multiplayer game. Dragon Quest 9 surpasses Secret of Mana as a multiplayer game because the game expands from a standard RPG into an open world game. Also, different players can be doing different things in the world, so you can have the main player and one other working on the main quest (the limitation is Player 1 is required to push the story forward), while the other two players are doing open world stuff. Truly one of the great RPG experiences, not just of that generation, but of all time. Dragon Quest 9’s story is more about the players and how you handle the world, while there is a 40-50 hour main story, the game is more like a 200-450 hour game you’d play with your friends over the course of a summer, or (if it is like me) over the course of about a year and a half. And you can pick up and play with newer players, and older players, it’s an easy thing to drop in and out of. The players who’ve experienced more just go into the newer player’s game, and play in that world for a while. If this is released again in the future, it’s one I hope sees even more players - especially since social co-op games are more popular now (Monster Hunter shows this), while they were a rarity in earlier times.


Dragon Quest 4 was separated into chapters, and the chapters were short stories featuring different characters with different types of gameplay. Some of the characters’ unique gameplay was so popular that they received spin-offs based on it. Like DQ5, there are some big spoilers in the game that also happen to reveal some of the most interesting elements about it - particularly around the main hero and villain.

Dragon Quest 1-3 are the only three games that follow a story.

Dragon Quest 1 is very short, features 1 player and 1 major town that acts as a hub; it can be grindy, but most of that has to do with players making the choice to grind themselves. Kind of like how people in FF8 choose to sit and draw or sit and turn enemies into cards when you the game is actually a much more balanced experience by simply fighting enemies, collecting AP, collecting items, and refining those items into magic - you can even use the magic because it’ll have a negligible effect on your junctioning and it’s easily replenished by refining more magic from dropped items. But anyway, if you WANT to get an overpowered character in Dragon Quest, you can do it fairly easily by grinding in certain locations, but it’s not necessary, and it slows the game down. I think if you’re interested in the history of RPGs, this is the game that pioneered, or at least popularized the RPG battle system: one of the mistakes people make is conflating post-Dragon Quest Wizardry games with their earlier games that didn’t actually have the menu-based user interface; that was introduced by Dragon Quest 1, or at least Dragon Quest 1 is the game that popularized it. It’s also the one RPG began the whole thing of integrating story and gameplay, this wasn’t really done before. Some games literally just printed the story in a separate booklet that came with the game to give context to what you were doing. So while it is hailed as the first “JRPG,” that reduces what Dragon Quest achieved for the RPG genre, and video gaming, as a whole to a smaller box than what’s warranted. It’s also worth noting that “JRPG” wasn’t a term popularized until after the coming of games like Knights of the Old Republic. The term RPG was used, and a lot of this happened because RPGs from Japan were virtually 23 or 24 of the top 25 (there was usually like one Ultima game or something in the mix) at any given time in the 80s and 90s.

Dragon Quest 2 takes place in the same world, but it expands it. It also expands the players to three from one, and has a much more in depth story. The dialogue was famous for its fancy mimic of Middle English in the localization.

But Dragon Quest 3 is where everything just explodes. It is the first Dragon Quest to feature a massive world, and at first it seems you’re on Earth. There is this city where everyone makes fun of you for being a bumpkin, and the game is ultimately the best RPG by far, prior to FF4 and Dragon Quest 4. But some put Dragon Quest 3 ahead of both FF4 and DQ4 because it was the first RPG to feature a major twist. While RPGs had twists before, never close to this level - like FF1, which I believe came out a bit earlier had a twist that was you go to the past and the boss is Garland, who was also the first boss of the game - a twist, yes, but it is more like a gimmick than anything that really has any impact on the overall game, other than the first quest was actually more a part of the main story than you first realized - DQ3’s twist is MUUUUCH bigger than that.

Dragon Quest 6 and 7 had interesting concepts, Dragon Quest 6 basically had two parallel worlds with differences to exploit in order to achieve something in the first, and Dragon Quest 7 was a game about resurrecting the world. Well, Chrono Cross did something very similar to Dragon Quest 6 a few years later, and did it better BUT: Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past, a non-RPG, also did the concept, and while it wasn’t as intricate, the game was WAY more fun than those two. And the rebuilding the world thing was kind of the Soul Blazer series thing, first doing it with ActRaiser, but the best version of that story was Terranigma, and well... Dragon Quest 6 and 7 to me just felt flat to those earlier games that did something similar.

Dragon Quest 8 is cosmetically beautiful, has many charming elements, and does some interesting things with crafting and character dialogue, but everything is SOOOO SLOWWWW in that game. I hate seeing where I’m going, it being so close, but still taking forever to get there. You know in some early turn based RPGs with obnoxious encounter rates? It was that feeling all over again. Also, the story involved chasing around this guy called Doulmagus, and all the anger towards that character felt very forced, I hated the character, but in the wrong way: I just wanted to get past him so I didn’t have to deal with him anymore, but it goes onnnn and onnnn and onnn and onnnnnnn. I think most people who liked this game are the ones who played some of it, but didn’t actually finish it, because there’s a lot that really starts to grate over time - mainly the big-slow feeling it has. It’s like a game you feel like you’re supposed to like because of all it’s charming elements, but know that you don’t really like it. While later versions fix some of the issues, like the 3DS version, they also reveal how poorly the game aged. I suppose I kind of resent this game a bit because for many people this is the only DQ game they’ve played, and it’s ultimately the least interesting in terms of gameplay, and one of the least interesting in terms of story. So I feel that people who think this is the best one will dismiss the brilliance of the Dragon Quest franchise, because the earlier games IMO are interesting to play through even to this day, even that simple and beyond basic Dragon Quest 1 is interesting to see where the RPG genre properly began.