Well, I'm converted! This was my first Dragon Quest game, and I can safely say that I regret not giving these games more attention sooner! Dragon Quest's strongest and most enduring quality is that it doesn't try to be anything other than the most quintessential JRPG, and it is only striving to refine and perfect that tried and true formula.

While i can totally see people writing this off as overly vanilla, it's anything but. Everything about this game is so endearing, it's almost intoxicating. Rab and Sylvando are absolute MVPs.

Clocking in at 81 hours upon defeating the Act 3 boss and obtaining the true ending, at no point did I ever feel the game was dragging along, which says a lot about a JRPG as this genre is packed with games that end up bring glorified endurance tests. With additional playthroughs, I will most likely be bumping this up to 5 stars.