Having finished the main game, I can now say the plot was a complete dissappointment.
I pretty much saw it coming though considering all the focus was on multiplayer and post-game content, but still; the whole thing was just extremely bland and most of the story reeked of hamfisted disjointedness you'd see in an MMORPG where it's just an excuse to kill monsters over and over for loot. And the clumsy morals that kept coming up almost made me vomit towards the end. I can hardly believe this was written by the same man as DQV.
I'd gladly sacrifice the whole customization aspect of the party for characters I can give a fuck about. It should've been so that you could only create the main character to your liking and the rest were presets with an actual personality. The job system still would've worked that way and customization would not have gotten in the way of making a good story.
While the battle system was tremendously enjoyable I can't shake the feeling that I just played World of Warcraft for 50 hours.
And I want to fucking kill that fairy right now. Might as well have added a "HEY! LISTEN!" voice track.
It wasn't a bad game at all and the sheer amount of content they packed in was impressive but the clumsy paper thin plot and excesive focus on monotonous farming and annoyingly time-consuming quest requirements made the quality suffer pretty badly. Got nothing on the other two DQ games I've played, ESPECIALLY not V.