This was my second time beating it. I didn't complete the Monster Park this time or do much of the other side stuff, so that shaved about 60 hrs off my playtime.
This is my favorite Dragon Quest/Warrior standard JRPG game (DQHeroes: Rocket Slime is probably my favorite overall). The only thing I can say bad about it is that they really do a bad job, across all the DQ/W games, of streamlining those things that you do a LOT, so I probably spent a good 2-3 hrs, or more, simply scrolling through the text when I went to save, see how much exp until the characters level up, and see how many battles left until each of my party members advances in their classes. I guess I didn't notice on my first playthrough about 10 years ago, but there are a LOT of typos and added words that shouldn't be there, which does get on my nerves a bit these days. There's also a lot of cringe-worthy sex and toilet humor
I really like the class system, which is a huge reason why my favorites in the series are 3, 6, and 7. I also really like how the first disc (which took me just shy of 100 hrs), is set up like several chapters where each chapter has you going back in time to save a piece of land and slowly reassembling the world.
Party AI, if you want to go that route, is actually REALLY good, to the point where they will fight better than you probably would by giving them commands when they've mastered enough classes to where they have a good amount of skills at their disposal. One major reason for this is that they fight in turn-based mode when they're given battle strategies as opposed to round-based when you control them manually. So, for example, they can revive a fallen ally during a turn that started with everyone alive (something you can't do when giving them commands yourself). They also know what the enemies' weaknesses are and will try to take advantage of them when you would probably not think to possibly waste an attack against a strong foe which could be immune to that status attack. In addition, they'll use a much wider range of attacks since choosing different skills is a bit tedious due to the sheer number of them that they all learn. Except for a certain monster or two in the final dungeon and the end boss, I ended up giving them all strategies.
