The game does without a predefined cast of playable characters in favor of giving the player complete control over the customizability of their party. From vocations to appearance, players can make their team unique and fit any team composition.

Allowing custom characters has its pros and cons.

Cons:

Your characters lack any personality, therefore the connection between members of your party and their interactions with the story seems rather generic or simply nonexistent.

This, however, does not stop you from imagining a personality for your characters in order to immerse them in the story.

Pros:

You have complete control over how your party performs. Skills transfer between vocations, allowing you to mix and match with a plethora of abilities while in combat.

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The story focuses more on the interactions and personalities of the NPCs rather than the player's characters, and Dragon Quest 9 does an excellent job at portraying an interesting story with intriguing characters, even if you are not playing as them.

One negative thing I must bring up is the DLC content which added new dungeons, bosses, and items. Because it was tied to the old Nintendo Online services, it is unlikely that you will be able to download the additional content. Through code hacks, I was able to get the DLC apparel items, but I was never able to unlock the new grottos added.

Otherwise, the game is great and should definitely be given a shot.

Hoimi Tables were fake and anyone who said they worked was lying don't @ me

The red-headed step-child of the series, and kind of deservedly so. The choice to make the party customizable added a lot of interesting party comp design, but the ability to use unlocked class skills in any other class meant that higher level fights came down to the choice between two Gladiators and two Sages or three Gladiators and one Sage. The customization also made the party personality-free, which hampered the storytelling of the game a fair amount—although there's still some good plot in the Fygg stories. Even still, a below-average Dragon Quest is still a great video game—it also features one of the better quest systems in an JRPG, as a surprisingly large amount of them add a fair amount of challenge and story to the game.

As my first JRPG, this game holds a special place in my heart, despite its flaws. As a kid, even I could comprehend the story, surprisingly, and I found it enjoyable. The combat mechanics are fine tuned and near perfection, in my opinion, but the coup de grace generation is too random for my tastes.

Obviously being a DS game, the visuals look how you'd expect them to, but I find a certain charm in them, thanks to Akira Toriyama's ageless art style. The sound design is also top notch. Sometimes I boot up my copy just to hear the theme song, wonderfully compressed onto a DS cartridge.

Dragon Quest remains the top dog of JRPGs with the ninth entry, and I certainly need to indulge the series more to fully enjoy it.

Battle systems that display action on the top screen and data on the bottom, or which distribute either of those across both screens, will render that game borderline unusable without exception.

Gave up right at the start after being plopped into a sky palace and instructed to speak to the headmaster. Never found him/her. Instead talked to a bunch of the same NPC copy pasted throughout the place offering only ludicrously frivolous dialogue (such as "this is a dead end") and going back and forth across the terrible map comprised of artitrary deviations and locked doors.