Originally released in the West under the localised Dragon Warrior title, it’s been nearly thirty-five years since Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii’s seminal RPG series, debuted in Japan. In that time, we’ve seen eleven mainline entries in a series which led the way in defining the JRPG genre itself.
Japanese Nintendo gamers have enjoyed every single numbered Dragon Quest game, and although some of them took their sweet time to arrive overseas, we’ve eventually had the chance to play all but one of the mainline games in English on Nintendo consoles, too. So, as this anniversary approaches with the series about to enter the second half of its fourth decade, we thought it the perfect time to rank the mainline Dragon Quest games — with your help, of course.
We’ve dispensed with the spin-offs on this occasion and listed just the main numbered games to keep things concise. If the game has been re-released, we’ve gone with the first version released in the West. We’ve also included the Japan-only MMORPG Dragon Quest X because, well, it released on no less than four Nintendo platforms in its homeland, and omitting it just didn’t sit right with us.
As with our other reader-ranked polls, we present the shortlist below and are asking you to score the ones you’ve played out of ten. Registered Nintendo Life users can click on the stars below to rate them and, as with our various Top 50 platform polls, the resulting ranking (which we’ll publish in due course) will be formed from these User Ratings. The ratings can fluctuate, and therefore so can the resulting list even after it’s gone live.
If you’ve scored these Dragon Quest games in our database in the past, those ratings will already be taken into account. If not, you can influence the ranking by adding your personal review scores at any time from now on, even after we publish the results.
Have your say below and rate every mainline Dragon Quest game you’ve played:
Click the stars below to rate each Dragon Quest/Warrior game you’ve played:
Dragon Quest 11 is not only my favourite Dragon Quest game but it’s possibly my favourite JRPG of all time.
It’s comfortably in my top 10 favourite games of all time.
Unfortunately the game had a gimped launch and didn’t get nearly as many sales as it could of done. The shoddy version came out on the PS4 and Xbox One like nearly a year before the good version of the game, to top it off Japan stopped caring about the PS4 and the main market for that game was Japan.
Square should have waited to drop it on the Switch and other systems AFTER the Switch version was made available, not before.
That mistake cost them millions in additional revenue, by the time the Definitive Edition was available, most people had moved on and the launch of DQ11 in Japan was nowhere near what it should have been.
