DQ1 ~ [3/5] Incredibly grindy at times, but honestly fairly fun for one of the first jrpgs just, ever. I played the nes version a long time ago, but I went with the gb version because of the a button interact improvement. Story is nothing special, but it's fun enough and I dig the little bits and pieces of worldbuilding. Toriyama's monster design is, of course, lovely. Well fully admit I used speedup quite a lot for grinding, which both shortened my playtime and made it much more bearable. Still, a fun mind-numbing rpg I played a lot while chatting with friends in vc.

DQ2 ~ [3/5] Overall a better experience than DQI, albeit imo not but any really significant margin. It's grindy, in my experience, than DQI, except for at the very end. But I think much of this is due to just how many encounters I got to in while traversing the seas. While yes, the ship technically made the much larger world in this one a lot more manageable to travel, it still felt very annoying and tedious in my experience. However, something I hadn't noticed is that DQI only having the main hero as a party member did make the adventure feel kind of... "lonely." This was honestly a unique vibe and kind of interesting, but I think having the two extra characters in this game, while also making combat more tactical in a couple of the bosses, did make the journey feel alive. And while the world feels a little clunky, the larger scope really does make it feel like a true adventure. Story was once again nothing too special, but that thing with the castle before the end boss was actually pretty cool. And of course, we got a lot of new Toriyama monsters in this one, which is always a delight to see. Overall, still a pretty fun experience.