To be honest, I didn't really find Dragon Quest games to be hard, though I did play those first before ever trying a Final Fantasy game [back in the NES/SNES age of course]. I feel that recent Dragon Quest games weren't very good at all, but the old ones were the best [I-IV]. Dragon Quest is awesome in many ways except for the fact that Akira Toriyama does the artwork for it. But obviously, Dragon Quest no longer piqued my interest after Dragon Quest IV, whereas Final Fantasy still continues to pique my interest.
The story seems rather dry to me, but then again it's not something I'm going to hold against it, considering the era in which it was developed, in which case it was quite an advanced story considering other games of that time. Also, I'm pretty amazed at how they were able to cram all the information for the skill-up system into the NES cartridge [it seems a lot more complex and meticulous than a basic leveling system]. To me, that's pretty amazing.