Dragon Quest games

[Pumpkin]

Which ones are the best and why?

[VeloZer0]

I can't help you, but having just completed my first DQ game (8), I am also interested in this.

[Spuuky]

Tier 1: IV, V
Tier 2: III, VIII
Tier 3: VI, IX
Tier 4: I, II, VII

I love them all dearly.

[Del Murder]

VIII is my favorite and I wish they built on that instead of going this weird co-op route. IV is also excellent. In general I prefer the games where the characters have actual personalities instead being a team of blank avatars. V did this well too, with the family angle, but I'm not a huge fan of the monster party members.

[The Man]

V is my favourite. I haven't played like half of them though.

[Wolf Kanno]

V and III are my favorite entries. V for the Coming of Age story which was novel for its time and I love collecting monsters. III was frankly ahead of its time and I'm always a sucker for job class systems with min/max benefits not to mention it has my favorite plot twist in the series.

VII is my next favorite because it's the game that will make you lose six months of your life just trying to do everything and I feel it might be the best written entry despite the main plot being pretty straight forward and simple. It's hard to explain...

VIII and IX are next, VIII had great characters and an interesting premise but the plot is too thin to carry the length. The gameplay also was a huge step down from VII imo. IX is a vast improvement in the gameplay department but takes the episodic design of the story to an extreme that burnt me out.

After this is DQI which is absolutely simplistic and bare bones but I found it really fun to play through the granddaddy of the genre.

IV comes next. While it certainly has a cast, their personal stories don't mean jack trout after the Hero shows up which really bothered me. Beyond that the game doesn't have enough gameplay options to balance its basic design and vanilla gameplay to keep me interested. The chapter set up in the beginning is interesting but unbalanced with Toriko being the high point, Ragnar being short and sweet and the rest just overstaying their welcome.

DQII is probably on the bottom because it has some clunky design from the early days of the genre as well as some incredibly frustrating cheap shots in difficulty that makes the last stretch of the game an endurance match on your patience as you watch your whole party get PK by an enemy using Self-Destruct in the first round of combat on your fifth attempt on the final dungeon.

[Colonel Angus]

VIII, because that's the only one I've played in depth. I also love the characters & design of that one a lot.

[Motdrafin]

DQV is definitely the best! It has an awesome story following the main character's entire life, with an amazing soundtrack and fun monster-catching gameplay.

Overall, this is my ranking:
1. DQV
2. DQIV
3. DQVII
4. DQVI
5. DQVIII
6. DQII
7. DQIII
8. DQIX
9. DQI

[metagloria]

I've only played VIII, IX, and the VI DS version. I really want the DS versions of IV and V too, but they seem to never pop up at my local game stores. (If I cared enough, I'd order them online or something.)

While VIII is probably my favorite of those three, IX holds the distinction of being the game I sunk the most hours into on a single playthrough (178).

[Polnareff]

My ranking is pretty much:

1. VIII
2. VII
3. VI
4. V
5. III
6. IV
7. II
8. I
9. IX

I know the rankings look kind of weird. I really enjoyed the hell out of 8 because it was the last one to feel like a DQ game.

VII was amazing because of how long and challenging it was. Even without doing sidequests you were still looking at like 70 hours of gameplay. I wish Squenix would get the dicks out of their butts and release the 3DS remake here. :shrug:

I loved IX when it first came out, but playing it now bores the bejesus out of me, because it's so easy to kill everything. Even the grotto bosses were super easy. All you had to do was get a multihit skill for everyone and get their strength up. Then just do whatever multihit moves you have and everything dies to it. I killed the last boss in like 5 turns doing that and was only level 50 or so. DQVIII got kinda broken too, but not "kill everything in two hits" broken. If they remade this game and made it more challenging, then it would be so much more fun for me.

DQI just didn't age well. That's all that is.

[Bolivar]

My rank is DQV > DQVIII > DQIV > DQIII > DQVI

[Pumpkin]

So after reading this thread I'm thinking of playing either IV or VI

[Bolivar]

If i had to steer you one way or the other i would definitely say IV. I'm finishing VI right now and it just doesn't have the same magic as the others I've played

[Scotty_ffgamer]

Anyone know how hard the DS Dragon Quest games might be to track down for a reasonable price?

[Spuuky]

Anyone know how hard the DS Dragon Quest games might be to track down for a reasonable price?Not hard at all unless you really need a 'new' copy.

[Sephex]

VIII and V are my favorite ones. I also enjoyed the original for nostalgic reasons. I like all of them to an extent.

While all of them have a focus on grinding, I think VI and VII focus a bit too hard on grinding if you want a decent character from a gameplay perspective.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I now have IV, V, and IX. Someday I'd love to grab VII and VIII.

[Bolivar]

While all of them have a focus on grinding, I think VI and VII focus a bit too hard on grinding if you want a decent character from a gameplay perspective.

I usually don't have to grind too much, if at all, in DQ games but I am actually spending a lot of time grinding in DQVI just to beat the final boss.

[Galuf]

i only started playing the first (snes) but it seems like a good game .

i have 1 2 5 and 6 to play so yeah hope theyre good

[Sephex]

While all of them have a focus on grinding, I think VI and VII focus a bit too hard on grinding if you want a decent character from a gameplay perspective.

I usually don't have to grind too much, if at all, in DQ games but I am actually spending a lot of time grinding in DQVI just to beat the final boss.

Well, my main problem is that to get to certain classes in both game, you have to grind like crazy to "unlock" them.

[Bolivar]

Yeah that's the problem I have right now, I need one of my casters to have Kazing but didn't even have one of the pre requisite classes mastered, much less the grinding it took to get the advanced class with the spell up to level 5.

[Necronopticous]

Lamonda & I are currently playing through VII and enjoying it. A while ago we set out to play through the entire series in order but stopped in the final chapter of IV because we got so frustrated by the AI-controlled party members. In total, I've only actually played I, II, III, IV, VII, and VIII at this point. It's very difficult to rank them because I actually really enjoyed all of them. I'm sure Lamonda would say her favorite is the original, because of its perfect simplicity (and because we got to draw dungeon maps on graph paper), which is a tempting choice for me as well, but there is just so much to be said about the others. VIII was the first that I ever played in full, and it really impressed me. The innovations of III basically blew my mind after playing the first two. I absolutely adored IV until the aforementioned problems with AI-control. I guess the only one that I was kind of so-so on was II, but I still enjoyed it overall.

[Del Murder]

I thought you could set the party to manual control in IV?

[Necronopticous]

I think that was something that they added to ports/remakes, but we could not find such an option in the original.

[Wolf Kanno]

I think that was something that they added to ports/remakes, but we could not find such an option in the original.

This, the ports and remakes do a lot to clean up some of the series clunky design. A.I. control was kind of a big thing in III, IV, and V but the ports set them to manual. XP/Gold were also changed to make the games far less grindy. I think DQVII for the PS1 is probably the last DQ to stay true to some of the more... antiquated design. It's one of the reasons why I do really enjoy the DQ ports because they fixed quite a few issues I've always had with the series.