I'm convinced that DQ would be on par with FF in America if the first DQ to come over to North America were II or III and not 1. I think 1 was released too late in English and too dated for the time period it was released in. Does this opinion have merit?
Pre-Nintendo-Power, there was the Nintendo Fun Club, a 4 issue newsletter, and I recall reading a preview about Dragon Warrior (of course, much later on), this was back in '87, early '88. Also the first ever Nintendo Power had pictures of people lining up in Japan for DQ3. I probably just glanced this over when I first got ahold of that issue, never would have guessed that 30 years later I'd spend half the year playing the 11th DQ game.
Also, when I first got my NES in '88 I also got a copy of The Official Nintendo Player's Guide (from 1987). They had this mention of the game, which I think was originally planned to come out in early '88 instead of summer '89.
It's funny, I remember reading the Mega Man 2 issue of NP and they had a small preview of DQ1. I remember seeing so much text and menus and it looked completely alien to me, unlike any other game I've ever seen. I went to the mom and pop rental shop a bit later that summer and saw they had the game to rent, so I rented it and remember it took me like 2 hours just to get out of the throne room
- that was my first ever RPG experience, enjoyed it enough to later buy it (one of the few to have actually purchased the game), but it was FF1 and more importantly the original Phantasy Star that hooked me on the RPG genre. Also played the NES port of Ultima III and I remember being a bit too confused about where to go, though I thought being able to attack townspeople and the king was awesome. The NES Ultima ports are pretty cool though (except 5, which is absolute trash)... western RPG gameplay but ported by Japanese devs with an 8 bit Japanese art style and interface.