>>1340689
>But apart from that, I'd like to ask in thread, what am I in for?
It's one of the tougher Dragon Quest games, but there's actual story reasons for that. There's some ways to trivialize the game a bit but I think it's much better to just experience it as the devs intended than just minmaxing your way to victory.
As an RPG, it's basically as simple as there is, you got turn based gameplay, physical and magical attacks and "classes" (in a very lax sense, at least early on in the series). Consider the fact that DQ5 is technically the first monster-catcher type game ever created, or at least publicly known, so the balance may be a bit off.
In my opinion the game is nowhere near similar to Final Fantasy, despite sharing a lot of mechanics, just the fact that you don't need a thesaurus to get through the games should be all you need to know about it.
>Also, I see this game is on the PS2 and NDS, which one should I go for?
SNES version may be a bit outdated, but it's the original so it always counts as the actual experience;
PS2 requires a fan translation that, from what I've been told, is pretty much on point, but can feel a bit on the dry side.
NDS is kind of disappointing, graphically speaking, plus it suffers a lot from the cockney curse where Squeenix learnt the wrong lesson from DQ8's popularity and started giving everyone retarded accents rather than tying them to their character traits, the did Bianca dirty in this one.
As for mobile, it's always an option (and I usually much rather prefer it for the older titles thanks to the QoL features and portability), but the people who make pirated versions of the games often add weird modifications or flat out cheats to get you through the early game, which kind of ruins the fun.
If I had to pick one, I'd probably go for the NDS version simply because it's the easier to get and you have multiple ways of playing it (on actual hardware or emulated, touch controls or buttons).