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.