Weird, Wonderful, and Completely Optional: Dragon Quest's Best Side Stories You Absolutely Shouldn't Skip

Here's something every Dragon Quest veteran knows but rarely talks about: the main quest is almost never the best part. Sure, stopping the Lord of Darkness or whatever world-ending threat has shown up this time is technically the point. But the soul of Dragon Quest lives in the margins — in the NPCs with inexplicable problems, the optional questlines that spiral into something unexpectedly moving, and the side content so bizarre it feels like it wandered in from a completely different game.

This is a celebration of all of that. A love letter to the distractions, the detours, and the deeply weird optional content that keeps completionists coming back to these games years after the credits roll.

The Haunted Romance of Dragon Quest VIII

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King doesn't get enough credit for its side content, which is wild because some of it is genuinely among the best in the franchise. Take the storyline involving Dominico and his dog, which starts as a quirky fetch quest and ends somewhere emotionally resonant that you absolutely did not see coming.

But the crown jewel is the optional content surrounding Red, the treasure hunter with a complicated history and a personality that could sand paint off a wall. Following her optional questline gives you a much fuller picture of who she is and why she acts the way she does — and it's entirely possible to finish Dragon Quest VIII without ever experiencing any of it. That's almost criminal. If you've played Dragon Quest VIII and skipped her story, go back. Seriously.

Dragon Quest IX's Wish System: A Side Quest Generator for the Ages

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is a weird entry in the franchise for a lot of reasons, but its approach to side quests was genuinely ahead of its time. The game featured hundreds of optional quests tied to characters throughout the world, many of them surprisingly layered for what appeared to be simple fetch missions.

One standout involves a young boy who wants to become a great warrior and keeps asking you to help him train. You return to him multiple times across the course of the game, and watching his arc play out — slowly, across dozens of hours — is the kind of storytelling that only works in an RPG. It never announces itself as important. It just quietly builds into something that hits harder than it has any right to.

The game also featured a robust post-game quest system that tied into its multiplayer infrastructure, which we covered in our piece on Dragon Quest's multiplayer history. The side quest design was a huge part of what made that ecosystem work.

The Turnip Farming Crisis of Dragon Quest XI

Okay, let's talk about Erik's hometown. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, there's an optional storyline in Dragon Quest XI that involves returning to a specific village and getting entangled in what can only be described as an agricultural dispute with surprisingly high emotional stakes. Turnips are involved. Feelings are involved. It goes places.

This is Dragon Quest at its most characteristically itself — taking something mundane and rural and treating it with the same narrative weight as a world-ending prophecy. The game never winks at you or acknowledges how absurd the premise is. It just commits fully, and that commitment is what makes it work. You end up genuinely invested in whether these fictional villagers sort out their farming situation.

Morrie's Monster Arena (Dragon Quest VIII, Again)

Look, Dragon Quest VIII keeps showing up on this list because it's genuinely one of the richest games in the franchise for optional content. Morrie's Monster Arena is the kind of side system that would be a full game mechanic in a lesser RPG — here it's just something you can do if you feel like it.

The characters you meet through the arena circuit are a highlight. Morrie himself is a theatrical, flamboyant personality who feels like he was designed specifically to be memorable, and the optional story content tied to his arena goes deeper than you'd ever expect from what's essentially a minigame hub. The monsters you recruit along the way each have their own flavor, and building a team you're proud of creates a sense of investment that the main quest sometimes can't match.

Dragon Quest V's Marriage Subplot: The Side Content That Isn't Really Optional

This one is technically part of the main story, but it functions so differently from everything around it that it deserves a mention. Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride asks you, partway through the game, to choose a wife from a small group of candidates. Each option has a distinct personality and affects certain aspects of the story going forward.

What makes this fascinating is that it's not really a side quest — but it has all the energy of one. It's the kind of optional-feeling content that the game treats as completely mandatory, and the result is that players feel genuine ownership over their version of the story. Dragon Quest V has one of the most passionate fanbases in the franchise partly because of this mechanic. People will argue about the right choice with the intensity usually reserved for actual life decisions.

Why This Stuff Matters

Here's the thing about Dragon Quest's optional content: it's where the franchise's humor and heart live most freely. The main quest has to hit certain beats, establish certain stakes, resolve certain conflicts. The side content doesn't have to do any of that. It can be weird. It can be small. It can be about turnips.

That freedom produces some of the most memorable moments in RPG gaming — moments that players carry with them for years and bring up in communities like this one. If you're playing through any Dragon Quest title and sticking strictly to the critical path, you're getting maybe sixty percent of the experience. The rest is waiting in the margins, quietly being wonderful.

Talk to everyone. Read every sign. Follow up on every rumor. Dragon Quest rewards that curiosity more generously than almost any other franchise in the genre.