As a longtime fan of RPGs, particularly the Final Fantasy series, I felt that I owed it to myself to play the Dragon Warrior (or Dragon Quest, if you prefer the true title) games to get a better feel for how console RPGs were born and have evolved over time. I'm going to give my thoughts, and I'd love to hear others' thoughts if they've played any of the games.

I tried DW1 in my sophomore year of college. I thought it was fairly decent, even though it felt very bare-bones from a graphics and gameplay stance. I did like the mini windows that appeared for a battle, creating a pseudo first-person view. I didn't like the copious amounts of grinding, and whether I was just too impatient or dense to figure everything out, I played with a walkthrough by my side. I don't think that detracted from the experience, though, since it was largely educational. Bottom line: decent game.

Dragon Warrior II, on the other hand, was terrible. I played it four years after beating the original. I applauded the addition of other characters to the party, but the application was sloppy. By the end of the game, they were only good as being meatbags to take punishment away from the hero. The enemies were way too strong and the grinding was even more painful than in the first game. And beating the final boss just came down to luck. That's a game that I'll probably never play again, but at least I can say I played it once.

I just finished Dragon Warrior III about a month ago. Much better than either of its predecessors. The class system is a lot better, and I found the difficulty to be much more tolerable. The end parts required some grinding, but it wasn't as tedious as before. I also liked the day-night system and the fact that it did have a purpose at times, rather than just being thrown in for novelty.

I'm currently playing Dragon Warrior IV now, and I'm on Chapter 5. So far I don't know if I can say it's better than DW3. They might be equal in my eyes. The different stories for each chapter is a nice addition, and there's clearly more of a story than in previous games. At times I've felt like there's too much back-and-forth going on, particularly when Taloon needs to raise 60K gold to clear the tunnel. But in general, I'm liking it.

As you can tell, I'm playing the games in order. I have translated SNES copies of Dragon Warrior V and VI, and I also have Dragon Warrior VII for PlayStation. I've heard great things about DQ8 for PS2, so I'll have to get my hands on that sometime.

So, after that long-winded post, what are your thoughts on the Dragon Warrior series? Do you think it's held up over the years as a franchise?