Kind of an odd Dragon Quest - the main story is not the bulk of the gameplay. Playing through to finish the plot goes by surprisingly quickly (especially relative to VIII or XI), yet this game probably has the most content of any Dragon Quest, technically speaking, as the grottos make the game immensely large. The job system in this game is very solid, so if you like dungeon-crawling and turn-based battle without too much plot, this was a great one. Unfortunately, a lot of this content is locked behind online play, so now that the Nintendo servers are shut down, you need to do some homebrew work-arounds to get this content back.

After so many Dragon Quest games centered around its core party, it's odd to get one we're but a loose cog in the mechanism of the plot. Our hero is a Celestrian - essentially an angel - assigned to the small village of Angel Falls, but when a cataclysm happens in their home, they find themselves cast down to the world below and stripped of their Celestrian powers. They're then forced to journey around the world, helping people to restore their faith and send the powerful energy of "benevolessence" back to the Celestrian world above.

I actually like the plot here despite the lack of any characterization to our entirely player-created party, plus there's also a really robust job system to boot, which I love! However, the game wants you to engage not just with its main narrative but also a pseudo-MMORPG style system of extremely grindy quests. If you can get into these you'll find Dragon Quest IX to have massive longevity far after the game concludes its narrative, but I found them off-putting and time-wasting.