Since the game's release I've slowly amassed 8 hours of play spread wayyyyy out.

I only recently got the Ship!

The music in this game is so awesome. Love it.
Oh and I think the midi 3DS music is better than the Symphonic version, come at me.

Fuckin' Youtube doesn't seem to have the 3DS OST.

I'm the first one to rate this? What happened to everyone else who played it?!

I can sort of see why people consider this one of the weaker DQ games, but as someone who doesn't particularly care for the early games of the series, I actually liked it a lot. It's probably more formulaic than the others, but I didn't mind it, I still liked seeing what kind of town and crisis the next island would contain. I also didn't like how aimless things were in DQ VI, so I'd much prefer this approach to wandering around with no clue what to do next. While there are probably some places where the text and scenario should be more concise, the writing is still top-notch, and many towns having their own dialect really helps them feel like different parts of a diverse world.

There isn't much to the overarching story, but I think that's because this is the game which originally introduced the party chat feature. They probably focused their writing on the party chat and towns instead of a story to tie it together, but I'm okay with it because the party chat offers some nice personality to the characters that's missing from many games. And while I feel like some characters have a flimsy excuse for joining, the party chat makes up for it and things come together nicely later on.

They may not be very balanced, but I liked the vocation system, it's fun to level them up and see what new abilities they bring. Believe it or not, the system actually is even less balanced in the original, as this remake separates classes into basic and advanced, so characters no longer retain the strongest skills across all classes (unless you take the time to find and level monster classes). It's too bad they didn't take the time to balance it a bit more however, as well as improve other aspects of the game such as making the Wisdom stat not useless.

Overall, this may not be the strongest DQ but I still quite liked it, and it's much better than DQ VI. I'm glad we finally got it.

@VofEscaflowne I'm now wondering what your levels and team setup were when you tried the final boss. I went in with my team at lvl ~50, and I felt like I wouldn't have struggled with at least ten less levels.

@Mop it up
I had more issues with DQVII than you seem to have but we gave it the same score! I enjoyed it overall, but I would rate it among the lower DQ games, myself. Like with the other DQs, I want to post a full review of it on this site, but Switch and house moving stuff have been distracting lately.

I liked the vocation system too.

@TriforceBun Well, I don't necessarily disagree with your criticisms, which factor into my score. They just didn't bother me as much. My scores are also weighted against other games on the same platform.

For my ranking of the series, it will probably land in the upper-middle.

I'm getting back to this game now that I have access to 3DS homebrew and thus, the orchestral version of the soundtrack that was available in the Japanese version of the game.

The game is nice!