Took me just short of 46 hrs to beat it (I spent a lot of time in the casino playing slots, from which I purchased absolutely nothing). Dragon Quest is my favorite JRPG series and this didn't disappoint. Being my first playthrough, I went the Bianca route since she is the obvious "correct" choice being the only one with a character profile in the game's manual.
As with all the mainline DQ games, you'll get pretty much exactly the same thing in this entry as you'll get from any other installment. Being able to get monsters you defeat to join alongside you and fight is nice since you're able to fill out an entire party before finding the normal humans that you would normally be using. I didn't experiment with many different monsters since I got a Slime Knight for my first catch and it quickly turned out to be extremely well-rounded as an extremely good attacker as well as a more than serviceable healer (the only shortcoming being that it didn't learn Zing) to the point where I almost always had it in my fighting party right through the end boss.
I can easily see how this game might turn some people off if not using a walkthrough since there is almost no direction when searching for your wife (I'm assuming this will be the same regardless of the wife you choose) and you pretty much just have to methodically go to every single location in the world to get the bits needed to progress the game. You basically go into a town/castle, talk to everyone to see if there is anything you need to do, if not, proceed to the next town/castle and repeat. I spent several hours almost aimlessly wandering around the world -- good thing you should pick up the Magic Carpet at the first place you're told to go to at this point in the game, as you can't be attacked while riding it.
It seemed kind of odd that the Legendary Hero ended up casting buffs or used a healing item about 2/3 of the time during the final battle since the end boss dispelled magic about half the time.
Things that knocked my rating down:
No text speed option
Several locations force a set party order causing you to have to reorder your party every time you exit these locations
I have no problem with having little direction in a game, but a big chunk of the game gives zero hints as to where to go (unless I just missed them)
Very low difficulty as I defeated the end boss on my first try without even needing to change out party members during the battle, and I did absolutely zero grinding
I ran into a couple glitches -- I fell into a sand area in the Faerie World and the only way to get out was to cast Zoom, and the Yggdrasil Dew did not show up in my inventory so I could never actually use it (not that I ever needed to).
