Games like these can be a little hard to rate. Should I rate them based on how fun they are to play now, to a modern audience, or how influential they were? I'm being a coward here by going with "a little bit of both", but I do know that despite how barebones DQ1 was, I had a fun time with it. I might have had a different tune if I'd played the original instead of a version with some quality of life added in, but it was a nice little game to zone out to. Sometimes, all you want in a game is Number Goes Up, and this one was short enough that the grind didn't overstay its welcome. It was also really neat to see what did or didn't eventually become a JRPG staple. If I had to make one big complaint, though, it's that the Switch version looks like a cheap RPGmaker port. When I realized the SNES version had great sprite animations instead of static jpegs I felt extremely cheated. What gives, Squeenix!