Way back in grade school, I subsribed to Nintendo Power just to get the free game. The first time I played Dragon Warrior, I had never seen an rpg and was like wtf is this crap?!?! After plugging away for a day or 2, I was absolutely hooked and my opinion of the genre had changed dramatically.

I also own DWII for the original Nintendo.

I believe that I've played III and IV on emulators over the past 10 years, although I don't believe I ever finished those.

A few years ago, I put about 100 hours in DQ8 which is probably in my top 3 favorite video games ever. After doing some searches for games similar to DQ8 and coming up empty, I changed my plan to look for the games missing in my DQ experience.

Btw, I still have all the NPs and they somehow survived in near mint condition... some of the ones I have are the introduction to Mario3, SFII Turbo, Battletoads, just to name a few :)