All the things of RPGs I like with none of the junk I don't.
Dragon Quest IX is the newest installment in the super popular Japanese RPG series. The story goes you are a Celestrian, a guardian angel who recently took over watching over the small villiage of Angel Falls. You do good deeds and receive Benevolescence to take up to the sacred realm as an offering to the sacred tree in hopes that the offerings will cause the tree to bear fruit so that the Celestrians may be able to ascend to be with the almighty one at last. However it turns out you are the one who gives the offering that causes the tree to bear fruit, but something goes wrong, a bolt of lighting crashes down blasting you to Earth where you are stripped of your Halo and wings, now a mortal but still retaining some Celestrian abilities like talking to spirits and it's up to you to find out what happened.
Sadly with the setup with the game this means you and your party members don't get much development as characters but this is counteracted by the stories and events of the villages and people you encounter.
Gameplay has made a couple changes. You still have turn based battles but now the series finally ditched random encounters. You can see enemies walking around and choose battles. I HATE random encounters so this was a major plus for me. I also like the enemy design in this series as opposed to FF which takes itself way too seriously. Where else are you going to fight sentient pickles with spears or robed kittycat wizards? :P Battles tend to flow well and reap good rewards. But oddly enough there's not many things that allow one to restore MP which makes no sense to me.
Also this series focuses on a multiplayer element and it's clear it borrowed ideas from a certain super popular MMO. While there's no Wi-Fi mulitiplayer you can team up with friends wirelessly and quest together. You're main player starts out as a minstrel but there's a vareity of jobs and abilities to choose from and the customization is great however when it comes to equipment it seems as though the devs were hell bent on forcing you too look as stupid as possible like wearing bunny a suit or a slime hat which are more powerful than just a nice set of armor. This is clearly a series with a sense of humor.
You can also get serious RPG ADD with this. Thanks to dozens of sidequests you could spend hours just doing menial tasks and playing with the alchemy without even touching the main quests and on top of that the wi-fi allows for new quests to be uploaded on a weekly basis. Clearly they got some ideas from WoW.
Overall this is a great RPG experience. Lots of customizations. Tons of stuff to do. Lots of exploration and great combat.