I mean, I respect the hell out of it for basically inventing JRPGs, having great music and art, and some of my favourite series are parodys of it (Earthbound/Mother).
But lord help me, I just cannot get into this series. It’s stories and world building suck. It’s so very, very chuddy in its values and characters. All about birthright and bloodlines (Something that’s putting me off the Zelda and Fire Emblem series too as I get older). It’s also got that Square Enix sexism stink that I find myself being less tolerant of the older I get.
Please feel free to roast me for this opinion, it’s just my personal preference after all.
If you like the Dragon Quest series I would love to hear why, because I want to like it. Maybe I just haven’t played the right one. I’ve only played 8 to completion on the PS2 back when I was a kid, and I tried the Demo of 11 but wasn’t really gelling with them changing the iconic presentation of their battles, if that makes sense (a nitpick, I know)
I bought a (used) PS2 towards the end of its life mostly for DQ8 (and later Personas 3 and 4).
When DQ11 arrived on PC, I actually asked for it as a gift at near full price rather than waiting for the inevitable 75% off, but somehow I never got very far on it.
It manages to not age well even as a new title-- the tropes are a bit too tropey (Sylvando, dear, I went to the freaking Castro and saw less flamboyance) and the storyline doesn’t seem to give a rewarding feel of forward motion, just bouncing from aimless episode to episode like a shonen anime that went 500 episodes beyond its original vision.
It does have a unique nostalgia as a franchise in that it was basically EVERY American’s first JRPG, due to the first installment being given away by the millions as a “subscribe to our print game magazine” promotional item, so whenever you look at someone trying to produce a “8-bit/16-bit RPG” homage, it’s going to smell a lot like Dragon Quest.