Dragon Quest 9

Holy shit, this game is good.

I played this game about 5 years ago, but I was a stupid teenager and didn't have the attention span for it. I eventually shelved it and didn't touch it for a while. Just today I got an urge to play a traditional RPG, remembered the game, and dug it up. HOLY SHIT IT'S FUCKING GOOD. Everything about it is traditional and by the books, but it has so many convenience features and does everything so well that I can't complain. The combat started off weak with just one character, but if you fill up your party it feels like you're a gang, roaming the land beating the shit out of everything. The story is generic, but it knows it's generic and makes clever jokes and puns, and overall I think the writing is pretty good. Overall, the game is very polished, and I appreciate that.

Has anyone else played this? Any opinions?

it's essentially a protoMMO and the postgame is nothing but grinding for a less than 1% chance to go up a tier on the grindlist.

game could've been a lot better but also a lot worse.

You missed the glory days when people actually walked around with the game for coop shenanigans. If you can get some friends to pick it up, do it as soon as possible. The AI party is great, I even liked my randomly generated ones so much I remade them when I went from emulator to legit cartridge.

Also, if you care about unlocking shit, grab any class-unlock quest you can and keep it in case you fulfill the requirements by accident.

Not likely, since a lot of them are tedious bullshit like the Ranger quest (kill 20 or so Weakon Beakons with poison, when poison does like 4 hp per turn, they have a pool of around 60, and the easiest way to inflict poison is with a dagger that has something like 30% chance per hit. You will be lucky if, out of an encounter of 3, one dies to poison.)

I've been playing this bad boy for the last couple of days. I have to consult a dictionary every now and then since my moonrunes aren't perfect, but godDAMN does it fill me with a sense of adventure. I've heard that the PSX version is long as shit (we're talking, 200 hours on a short playthrough) so I'm probably in this for the long haul.

50% of the content was free DLC that got lost when gamespy was shut down so you just played half the game.

(OP)
I hope you're playing it Emulated since a chunk of its content is stuck behind a wall. Only other way is an Action Replay or Save Editor.

I found the Luminary class quest as one of the most annoying.

God, I want to use my legit cartridge more, but those upscales are way nicer looking. It's a small enough screen that you don't really notice too much, but damn.

Wasn't someone working on an emulated server for a bunch of DS games that relied on online downloads?

I don't even remember getting the Luminary quest, the worst I had was probably the Sage. I played sword-and-board the whole time. White Dragon Armour, Miracle Sword+, and Empowered Shield for maximum aesthetics. Trailblazers Bandana for when i'm just bumming around.

Don't forget they can also cure themselves for more than their total health.

Luminary requires you to find Maoi Minstrels which took me weeks to find a dungeon map with them and then kill them in some annoying way while they have the power to fuck your shit up if you aren't lucky.

Someone was working on one but I paid any attention to it in a while and it wasn't downloads, it relied on servers to tell it when to change what was already on the cartridge.