I just wanted to mention this surprisingly good manga that I have been reading. I have a feeling many people have missed this jewel. I mean anime shows based off of much more story oriented games (like Final Fantasy Unlimited) didn’t do so well, so the chances of a dragon quest manga doing well seems low (at least to me it did). Also, the manga never made it to America.
Anyway, I heard some good reviews about it and decided to give it a try. To me, it sounded like a good Dragonball clone. At first, it pretty much seemed like that. It had the likeable hero trying to save his friends and the mini stories were charming in a sort of nostalgic way. Then, the main adventure started. The plot at first still seemed Dragonballish with its quirky teacher and young, super-good hearted main character and interesting battles. To summarize the story, the hero Dai needs to defeat the evil demon king Hadlar and his 6 generals in order to save the world. Yeah, the story is cliche. But as the story continued, I found myself really liking the characters and the deep characterization. One character I particularly like is Pope, the cowardly hero. I normally don’t like cowardly heroes, but Pope is just a likeable guy. Mainly, the manga starts slow, but its good characterization and the way it tells the cliché rpg story in a way that makes the cliches seem fresh won me over. I’d recommend this manga to anyone who likes great characterization and a good, classic rpg story done well.
P.S. I was thinking of putting this in the anime recommendation thread, but I wanted to put it here so anyone who has also read this manga could post about how much they liked/hated it.
You can read the manga at http://www.onemanga.com/Dragon_Quest_Dai_no_Daiboken/