I think I might *gulp* be a DQ fan.

[Wolf Kanno]

The second disc is about 20-40 hours in terms of story. It mostly involves backtracking to a few places and exploring the parts of the world you didn't the first time. So the game is total about 100 hours to beat give or take 10 hours. You could probably finish it even faster than that but you will miss a lot.

The story really picks up once you get to Dharma Temple as well as the game itself since all the job classes start opening up (btw don't be fooled, the Shepard is an awesome class and I highly advise you make one of your characters into one when the job first becomes available, also make sure to unlock the Teen Idol class as well cause it has a great healing ability that costs nothing) at least for me that is. I would recommend to at least try to get one if not two third tier job classes for the final boss. You can ignore the Monster Hearts cause they have an abysmal chance of dropping and only the Tier 3 monsters give you anything worth using.

As for side stuff, Mini-Medals are pretty easy to do and its fine to ignore the town and casinos but one I recommend doing cause frankly it doesn't require much effort on your part are the pageants. They are based purely on your stats and equipment so basically just playing with equipment or just simply leveling and then dropping by and entering can net you some decent stuff without really forcing you to spend hours on it. Still, I would say to at least play around with everything cause VII has a ton of stuff to offer, especially for a non-remake DQ game.

[Evastio]

I've played DQ I, II (haven't defeated), III, IV, V, VI, and IX.

I'd say that III, IV, V, VI, or IX would be my favourite. I can't really pick one since each have something I really like about the game (III's class system, IV's story with Psaro, V's Monster Recruiting System, VI's having both Monster Recruiting and a class system, though the monster's you could get were limited and most of the classes lowered your stats quite a bit, and IX having lots of character customization and sidequests).

[Bastian]

I am . . . not playing an official version of VII, shall we say, because the USED ones on eBay are much more than the game actually originally cost (I even saw an "unopened" one for $225!).

So I'm breaking my own rule and playing it on my PC. But the sound is all wonky and it latches onto a midi sound and will not let go of that note, creating all sorts of "lovely" dissonance not originally intended. Grr. Has anyone encountered this and knows how to fix it?

[Del Murder]

Wow, it's worth that much? Maybe I should sell mine...

[rubah]

In celebration of having a NES again, Peegee and I started playing Dragon Warrior tonight! We're level 7, bitches!

It's actually pretty fun for being such a grindfest. I didn't realize how tired of imps, w. wolves, GrOgres etc I was! For some reason, the archaic mode of speech doesn't bother me in this game (it was really irritating when I started DQ 4 on ds, for some reason). I also really like infinite lives

[Mirage]

I played DQ8 once. It was like playing a NES game with prettier graphics. Needless to say, I put it away pretty quickly.

[Bastian]

I'm in the midst of DQ7. . . and I sort of lost interest. A guy just walked up to me and totally destroyed my party pretty instantly. Which is annoying because none of the bosses up until this point have given me any trouble at all, and I wasn't expecting that interaction to be a boss fight at all.

I had been playing the game daily, but since being destroyed in that unexpected boss battle . . . I haven't played the game since. Almost five days have passed . . . I might just move on to DQ9 now.

[Wolf Kanno]

I wouldn't be so disheartened because of one boss. You may have just been ill equipped for the fight. If this was after Dharma Temple, chances are you may just need to play around with class changes to build a sturdy party to deal with bad guys. DQ isn't like FF where the job classes are standalone, you need to level them and quite frankly, they level faster than your party sometimes.

So which boss? What are your levels and what are your classes?

[Del Murder]

I remember giving up against some boss that had something to do with a tree. It was super hard compared to anything at that point and wasted my party. Finally I grinded enough to where I could take it out only to discover a second boss fight almost immediately after which destroyed me again. At that point I was like 'why am I doing this?' and played MGS or something instead.

[Bastian]

Turns out I was a moron.

It was right after Dharma Tower and it was a scripted battle. I turned off the game before realizing that. :P I guess the battle is impossible to win because after I tried again last night and failed, a scene played out showing that that guy was SUPPOSED to beat me.

Life lesson: don't turn your video games off after you think you failed, because maybe you were just SUPPOSED to fail. :P

Of course, that being said the very next dungeon I went into I was totally destroyed by the bosses. I tried again with better tactics and was destroyed again. So... I think I'm back to where I was at in my previous post. :P I don't feel like level grinding. :/

[Wolf Kanno]

Dharma Temple is the point in the game where the kiddy gloves come off so to speak. It's a pretty mean place but the reward for succeeding is humongous. The hard part is just trying to compensate without Keifer in your party whose departure has significantly weakened your offensive game. You should be level 15 or slightly higher by this point. Luckily the game gets a bit easier after this but the difficulty curve does start to jump around after this point in time.

Sadly, you may have to grind a bit and the more I thought about this the more it dawned on me that if you were only playing the remakes of games up until this point then there is something very important you may have missed since VII has never been ported and VIII is a bit more user friendly than previous installments...

DQ games on the ports tend to be nerfed a bit. Mostly from raising the amount of XP monsters drop by 50% and lowering prices in shop by a third. DQ has in my memory at least, been a grind heavy series hence why it deserves its reputation of being "old school". I was a bit thrown off by you saying you like DQ but hate grinding but if the DS ports are like the GBC ports (I could be wrong) then I could understand, cause you rarely have to stop to level grind or more often than not, grind for gold to buy new equipment.

VII is definetly more of an old school grind in some parts but its not so bad overall since the game is quite generous with giving equips and the job classes tend to compensate for levels a little bit.

[Bastian]

I did quite a bit of grinding in DQ8, as well as 4 and 5. I just didn't feel like grinding at that point in time when I wrote that. I gr-.... Ground? Grinded? a bit yesterday and planned on doing it a bit tonight, but it got late fast. I will grind quite a lot tomorrow.

Dosn't "grind" also have a sexual connotation? Hm.

[Wolf Kanno]

It does but pretty much any word can have sexual connotations with it depending on how you say it.

[Bastian]

Celery.

Um, so I finally figured out that the SECOND boss battle that was kicking my ass was also scripted to do exactly that. Which I only found out by letting the scene play out after dying in it.

You'd think I'd have learned from last time.

So after figuring THAT out, I basically played all day long.

<.<

What? It's a great game.

But I have to admit, I am getting anxious about wanting to play IX. Is this Dharma thing the mid point of the game?

[Wolf Kanno]

DQIX isn't going anywhere...

As for your question, Dharma Temple is more like the quarter mark of the 1st Disc. The game is huge... You haven't even met your fourth and fifth party members yet.

I just see the place as a highlight cause its where the job class system becomes accessible. Btw, my suggestion for each of the characters is the Hero should be a Cleric, Gabo should be a Shepherd, and Maribel should be a mage.

Cleric gives you good healing magic which is going to help you in the long run but its great in the beginning cause Clerics get decent armor and defense. Maribel should start with a class that continues what she's been doing up until this point and Gabo can pretty much go anywhere but Shepherd have a few skills that are incredibly useful later on and once again I highly advise you make everyone go through shepherd cause it has two incredibly useful skills that will make the first half of the game much easier until you get access to the Dragoon class.