Alright, first three Dragon Quest games played and beaten. Here are my thoughts (bear in my mind, these are the iOS versions that were released on the Switch):
! Dragon Quest 1: Pretty basic as far as RPGs go. A relatively small world map, only one playable character, the bare minimum of narrative guidance, and only 1 or 2 bosses in the whole game. But hey, we all have to start somewhere. And for what this is, this is actually pretty good. One of my favorite things about this game is, once you've beaten the Dragon Lord, all the overworld enemies disappear and you're free to explore the entire world and check in on all the towns and villages (see, Earthbound? You didn't invent that!) There's just something so cathartic about traversing the overworld without fear of enemy encounters and I'm so glad they continued this in the other games.
! Dragon Quest 2: From what I understand, this is apparently the black sheep of DQ (typical, the second installment of a series), but…I dunno. I thought this was a fine natural evolution of the game. With this game, DQ reaches the milestones of having multiple playable characters, multiple monsters in combat, a boat for exploration, and they did away with that silly Magic Key system. Not to mention, we have a much bigger overworld with the continent from the last game only taking up maybe a tenth of this overworld (granted, it's been scaled down, but whatever). Speaking of which, I do enjoy the callbacks to the first DQ, like with the Dragon Lord's descendant still living at the bottom of this castle and actually helping you this time around. That said, the game could've provided a bit more guidance once the world opened up with the boat, since it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you're going to land in a place with monsters you can handle or that will utterly destroy you. Otherwise, good game. I was happy to play it.
! Dragon Quest 3: The most acclaimed of the first three and the most fleshed out and fully realized one to be sure. And HOLY BALLS IS IT HARD! Like, for real, basically every stage of this game is an endless challenge of overpowered monsters. I think it was only towards the end when I was doing all the side quests and collectible stuff that I could traverse the world without fear of dying from some bullshit. Well, regardless, this is still a good game. In fact, one of the coolest things about it that I don't think I've seen in any other RPG is the option of creating your own playable characters. And you can create as many as you want! It's a customizers dream come true! But, that said, it does kind of shoot itself in the foot with the additional feature of being able to change your players' class to a new one, while also remembering the spells and skills they learned from the previous class. So, in effect, it basically makes creating new characters pretty much pointless, since you can always just customize our already established characters. They do put in the condition that a character can only change class after reaching level 20, but, at some point, getting a character back to level 20 is pretty simple. Oh, and I never once bothered with the personality changing stuff since I had no idea what they would even do. Anywho, the story follows pretty much the same beats as the previous game. Linear travel for the first half, but then once you get the bot the entire world opens up and you have to track down a bunch of collectibles. Not bad, but I guess I wish they hadn't made the repetitive plotting so darn obvious. The overworld, of course, is vast, but, geographically, it's just a slight variation on Earth (I'm starting to notice some cut corners here). One thing I really liked about the port, however, was their portrayal of flight once you get the bird. Showing flight and the world at an angle is just a really pleasing and dynamic visual effect. In the end, the game throws you for a curve by revealing the "real" final boss and returning you to Alefgard, though I already had this spoiled for me. Oh, and the port has a bonus dungeon and an extra super boss, which I...haven't beaten yet. Sorry, but I'm just not ready to commit to that much grinding, especially when I've got other games to play. Maybe I'll do it at a later date. Anyway, I know I've made a number of complaints, but this is still a good game that I a lot of fun playing. And it's easily the most expansive of the first three games, so much so that it's hard for me to believe they were all released on the same system. It's just...for all the goods about it, it can also be a frustrating play. If they had fine-tuned a few things, this could have been a truly great game. But as it is, it's still very good and technically the best of the first three.
! So with three DQ games under my belt, I'm pleased to say I'm really enjoying series. It's rough around the edges, sure, but most RPGs were back in the day. Perhaps the biggest thing that sticks out to me though is it's brutal and punishing difficulty, forcing you to give up half your money every time your party wipes out, and half the time it's due to some bullcrap that no reasonable player could possibly have counteracted. If it wasn't for the quick save feature on the ports, this would have been quite a chore to get through. So...okay, yeah, not exactly praise, but the series does have a certain charm to it, due in no small part to Toriyama's character designs. Next up for me, I'm jumping all way the way up to DQXI so I'll just how much the series has evolved over years.
! Also, on a general note, I'd like to comment on how interesting it is that Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (and possibly other RPGs) used to put out, like, one game a year, sometimes having 3 or 4 installments on a single console. And nowadays it takes them, like, 10 years to make one and it's a big event when it's released and we're lucky if we get even a single one on a console (and in FF's case, they always suck).