I love Dragon Quest. I started with an animated series and discovered the games after that, but that does not mean I do not like the games any less. It actually helped, since I saw the battles as something more than text and numbers. For me, they were always having battles as in a TV show, and the spells caused more damage than just a few digits on a single character: they actually damage the ground and things like that.
Dragon Quest VII is actually my favorite one (with VI a close second). The amount of character interaction and development was awesome in that game (via party chat). And the end is no more or less ridiculuous than that of most videogames, especially when dealing with demons and the like.
About changing the name to Dragon Warrior, remember back then there was a Dungens & Dragons-related property using the name DragonQuest.
Thoul wrote:But, even then, I did think the psyche up transformations in DQVIII were a little too much of a copy of DBZ's super-sayian.
Something our "wise" friends from the USA branch thought would be cool, since they added it (the Japanese version has the characters get the pink glow, but the hero's hair is unchanged).