Although my track record for actually continuing to play a DQ game and finishing it is..bad, I'll still go ahead and post. Excluding 1-3, 7 and 10 because I've never played them (I have 7 for 3DS, but can't play it on my current 3DS because of the region lock )

6. IV - The one I dropped the quickest. I guess it was a combination of outdatedness and the story not hooking me. Honestly I don't remember much about it, just that I abandoned ship very fast.

5. IX - I dropped this pretty quickly too, as I just wasn't into what this game was going for. Creating your own party, the multiplayer angle, the relative lack of actual characters. Only reason this is above IV is because it felt less outdated.

4. VI - I had my doubts about putting this here to be honest, because although I did drop it quickly, it was because of circumstances at the time. The immediate story hook at least had me wanting to see what it was about, but yeah. I'd like to revisit this some day and actually give it a proper chance. It would most likely put it ahead of the next one on this list.

3. VIII - Okay, the first one where I actually got pretty far. Incidentally, it was also my first DQ game. I liked the way the overworld worked, especially since at the time I'd played a bunch of other RPGs that got rid of a lot of exploration. Beyond that, I thought the gameplay was..serviceable. The story, however, did nothing for me, nor did the characters. I dropped this somewhere around..probably 60-70% through the story, and that was after already pushing myself quite a bit to keep playing despite not liking it that much.

Which brings us to the DQ games I can actually be positive about.

2. V - Okay, besides the monster recruiting part, which I did very little of, I don't remember much sticking out here gameplay-wise, so I'm assuming it was pretty standard. That's okay, I don't mind standard. What I loved was the story, (SPOILER)where you go from being a little kid all the way to being a hero who has kids of his own. The passage of time is often ignored in JRPGs, but in this game you feel it full force, going back to places after years have passed. Plus actually handing down the hero baton to the next generation. At the time i played it, i hadn't experienced any story like it, and I thought it was pretty amazing.

1. XI - I'm a bit over halfway in this one I believe, but it's already my favorite. I really like the characters, I really like the gameplay, I really like the story (but won't elaborate on this since it's still a new game ) and I won't deny the massive graphical boost compared to previous games helps.