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Ah my first time with Dragon Quest...I gotta think back. This is gonna take sometime, so flashback mode activate!

It was a...not so dark and not stormy night. I was back in my room, since little me was about 5 or 6. Little me was getting bored with Pokemon, and also bored with Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening DX because of the fact I couldn't get passed Eagle's Tower. The next thing I knew, a new game landed in my hands.

I wasn't sure what it was, but the idea of a Dragon Quest caught my eye. So I started to play Dragon Quest III. The beginning seemed strange because of the personality, but he overlooked these things with a giggle. He moved onto killing things and getting new people. He was happy to see others in there.

Everything seemed so better than Pokemon and Legend of Zelda. Sure you were interacting with things but you had more of a party to grow! The people could have their own stories! I can't remember exactly what I did but I think I had a mage, a knight and some kind of jester. Little me liked funny things!

But the years passed, and Dragon Quest III was put into the shadows. Sadly it just couldn't do anything and it was not my true trigger to get into the fandom. It was my first game though. My true trigger was pretty much after I joined this guild and started to explore the realm of Dragon Quest. A good friend talked about Dragon Quest VIII so I started to look around for it. I decided to try and get more titles in the Dragon Quest series and now I have Dragon Quest IX as well. But if I would say anything, it was the first time I ever played Dragon Quest VIII that dragged me into the series.

OMG the music, the scenery...all of it made my mind just melt. It sounded like something that I had not heard before. The overworld is something else to me.

Didn't know so many people here started with III. It was my first DQ game as well. I got a copy of it when I was around 9 or 10. I had it on my gameboy color. I liked it very much, but I didn't take it in all the way, and I never beat it. I got stuck around the Gondo caves, if I recall correctly. Since that is where I was when I resumed the game many years later.

Like Nomgelo up there, my fandom didn't really kickstart until I got VIII. Unlike Nom, Dragon Warrior never really left my consciousness, even after I had stopped moving forward in III. I didn't have any consoles when I was really young, and I didn't get nearly as many games as I did in later years. But I remember looking through the pages of Nintendo Power and seeing articles on Dragon Warrior Monsters 2: Cobi's Journey and Tara's adventure, wanting one of them, but sadly never getting one of them. I remember seeing a guidebook to Dragon Warrior 1 and 2 in a different game store (but sadly not the game proper) and not being able to buy it. And I didn't just give up on DWIII either. I did play it (I was actually really overleveled when I picked it up again :B), but I just never got far enough.

I got VIII when it came out back in 2005 and loved it. It was big, beautiful, subtle, happy, sad, funny, tragic, and all that lovely stuff I've said already. And knowing that this was the same series I had played so long ago, I picked III up again not long after I finished VIII. I got much further, and actually ended up starting a new game by accident after I had beaten Baramos.

But it was during that new game where I caught on to the simple yet substantial nature of the series, and realized it was not unique to VIII. I remember the exact moment. It was after waking up the citizens of Noaniels, and one of them going "Hey, you look like that traveler, Ortega. He just left the village!" Where in reality, since the village had been unknowingly asleep for 20 years...

Not that it was entirely lost on me when I was ten. I remember the realization that hit my ten year old brain when I saw the Helmet in Muor and got it for myself.

Needless to say, I honor DQIII way more now that I have the experience to know what it really is. And it will always be a special game to me. Especially knowing what I do now as a DQ fan about the series and the industry in general at the time. It is still one of my series favorites (as shown by my character of choice), and I will always value it.

I think that was the point.

I've always been exposed to Dragon Warrior from the NES era since I was a kid, my dad is quite the late 80s ~ early 90s nerd!

However, despite always watching my dad and older siblings play it, I never "monkey see, monkey do" until my teenage years when I really started getting obsessed with older games, which was rather recent now that I think about it, I'm not that old in the grand scheme of things. D;
I started with the first Dragon Warrior, it took me forever to complete it due to the grind-fest NES RPG'ness of it, and moved directly to II, which was even worse. At first, they both were not really high tier in video games I played, that is until I convinced myself into playing III, as surely it wouldn't get harder than II, right? That is where I first begun my obsession. At the time, I only knew various Squaresoft titles like Final Fantasy, SaGa, Xenogears and so on, but III revolutionized my gaming life as I knew it. It was fabulously balanced for an NES RPG, fun, still had that feeling of exploration, without going alla II and being scary. Since then, I usually tend to compare RPGs to DWIII in terms of balance and amount of exploration and stuff.
III compelled me to play IV almost immediately, and what a fantastic choice I made sticking with the Warrior series, as IV turned out to be my all time favourite Dragon Quest/Warrior out there! It was like III, but with a phenomenal story for NES era, with fun balance, loveable characters, and more linear than III, but not spoon fed kind of linear.
Of course, being North American, I did not have access to V or VI, nor VII due to its rarity, so my DQ journey went uncounted for a few years until I tried IX. IX is a great game, it never ends, literally, but I think my obsession with NES titles glorifies the Warrior titles more for me.
After that, I grew up, learned the art of emulation, and played V and VI, currently playing VII on a crappy computer, and my journey into VIII is on a standstill back in my home town, being a dorm student of university, but that is my DW/Q story in a tl;dr!

Since then, I've played all walks of Warrior titles in terms of remakes, so my thought on the first two have increased tenfold. Although II still scares me to no end, no matter how much I try to play it, that's the charm of it. I really do like II, it's the most special DW for me, although not my favourite, it's the one that I gave the most time for, so I can one day overcome my fear of it, it ever.