I was always interested in doing this particular challenge for a Dragon Quest game. Four seemed like the natural choice, both because of the main character's canon name, and his well-rounded spells.

The first four chapters played pretty much the same as normal obviously, but after that I left everybody besides the hero in their coffins. It played a lot like Dragon Quest I really- attack, heal, attack heal, with some occasional Snub antics. Early access to the Falcon Blade and Meteorite Bracer helped.

Items usage was a lot more valuable than normal. Given the dearth of multi-hit weapons in this game, the Icicle Dirk was invaluable for killing large groups of enemies until I got Kazap. The Lightning Staff saw a lot less use than I anticipated, meanwhile. The Zenithian Shield is great for magic-using bosses, the Zenithian Sword was necessary for when Psaro started buffing himself, and the Massacre Sword was great for softening up certain bosses. It really hurts that Solo can't buff his attack at all, you feel the difference even when you get to 255 strength. The Staff of Salvation and Sage's Stone come in too late to be very useful, unfortunately.

The run was pretty much smooth sailing until I got to Baalzack, at which point I had to grind hard. Midheal just didn't recover enough health between rounds, and in the time it took for me to heal or cast Snub, he would undo all the damage I did to him, thanks to his stupid 50HP passive recovery each round. I had to get Fullheal in the end.

After that, it was pretty easy thanks to how many levels I gained, and the Miracle Sword. I engaged in some minor grinding before Estark, but in hindsight it probably wasn't really necessary. The only other boss that really challenged me after that was Pruslas, thanks to very unforgiving desperate attack. I had to stay consistently above ~210 HP, or I would be at risk of him hitting the desperate attack, and then killing me with his second blow. Thank god he doesn't have passive healing.

For Psaro, I grinded up to Level 50 and used all of my accumulated stat seeds, since that seemed to be around the range other people beat him at. Oddly, the phase that spooked me the most was the first one, because of his desperate attack and my lack of Buff. The phrase where he's just a green head on legs was also tough because of his meditation spam, which meant I always had to do more than 500 damage between heals. Thankfully I got some lucky crits, and he wasted a lot of turns with his Hot Breath and Disruptive Wave.

The final phase was a cakewalk, oddly. He didn't last very long, and insisted on spamming breath attacks all the time. These are deadly in a normal run because they hit the whole party, but they do less than his normal blows, so they were a relief here!

Since Metal Slimes are hard to kill quickly when fighting alone, I mostly relied on Cheeky Tikis and later Teaky Masks for my grinding. They're a great source of EXP, since they summon their bretherin faster than you can kill them, and aren't very strong. I'd slap on a Miracle Sword and just keep pressing A, occasionally looking back to heal when I got to critical health. It took a very long time (the game says I killed over 999 of both), but it was so low-maintenance that I could just kill them while i watched a film or something. It was a bit like a clicker game. When I wanted to end the encounter, I would just spam Poof, or nuke everything with Kazap. By the time I could kill Teaky Masks in one hit, I was gaining over 200,000 EXP per encounter!

I know that some people have done the postgame solo, but I'm happy to end my run here. You apparently need to grind seeds of life to get to 600 HP to even stand a chance against the Fungeon boss, and Aamon is almost impossible to get consistently. I reached the credits, I'm done.

For my next challenge, I think I'll try an all-Fisticuffs run of DQ8, hopefully with no grinding this time.