Only one of these I've legit played is DW3. (Unless 2 minutes of Ninja Gaiden counts.)
In 1988, I was introduced by my neighbor to Dragon Warrior. I was 8 years old, and this was the first time I had ever seen anything we would describe today as an RPG. In fact, it was to my amazement that it was an NES game where we could actually save our progress, too. I fell in love, hard, but unfortunately I rarely got to play. When I was at my friend's, he almost always took the controller. Still, I thought I was hot stuff for getting to level 9 and making it to Rimuldar to buy magic keys for the first time. Grinding, to me, was fun, and I was prepared to spend hours walking in circles waiting for random battles to happen. Still, DW1 had its flaws.
A few years later, I had the opportunity to play Dragon Warrior 3, and it basically solved all of that. Though my friends at the time were partial to DW4 and its stronger characterization and story, I preferred 3 where I could play the same people throughout and just grind grind grind. I was convinced back then (and for a long time after) that the proper way to play these games was to mash the fight button and then use MP strictly to heal once the battle was over. My party choice reflected this.
And that was the cool part -- I'd played a few party-based games on computer by now, so it wasn't a completely novel concept, but being able to choose my party was awesome. (I would not play Final Fantasy for another couple years.) The large, sprawling overworld, the winding dungeons, and the colorful enemies that I would mentally train myself to learn the HP totals for while I strove to earn the gold necessary for upgrades was simply engrossing. Not to mention, that was before you fell into a volcano and landed in the world of the first game, where we find out that this is actually the prequel to game 1.
Were I to play it today, I'm sure it would lose a lot of its luster. I probably would prefer 4, now, almost 35 years later. But as far as what it represented to me at the time, Dragon Warrior 3 was one of the greatest games of its era.
Only the exceptions can be exceptional.