The first thing I noticed about DQ 7 is that the game is very complex and takes ridiculously a long time to finish. Maybe you will not believe it, but I need more than 250 hours to finish it in my first attempt!!!!!! ( compared to my usual 70-80 hours for other RPGs). Probably the length I need to finish the game can be attributed to the facts that this is my first DQ game and also that I will never read walkthroughs or using cheat codes at my first attempt on a game no matter how frustrated I am with the puzzles.
But the story is very good, and the battles are challenging (turn-based). If Enix somehow ported previous DQ games to PSX (in English), I will definitely buy them. The game is different from Final Fantasy, IMHO, because it is more complex and need more efforts to play em'. FF5 and FF Tactics are probably 2 FF games that are similiar to DQ7 at least.