>>1
It has a small following over here.
Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in the US due to some copyright issues; with the release of DQ8 the name is changing back to Dragon Quest) is well-known from the Famicom/NES days; Nintendo gave free copies of DQ1 out to people who suscribed to Nintendo's magazine, Nintendo Power. We got it three years after Japan did. The timing of DQ's release in Japan was probably crucial to its success, and after three years it was really facing a completely different market.
The US market didn't know what to do with Japanese RPGs for years. Dragon Warrior I-IV came out, but none of the games were huge hits. When the Super Famicom/Super NES came around, Dragon Quest V/VI, and the remakes, were all passed over for US release. Final Fantasy suffered a similar fate; we only got Final Fantasy I, IV, and VI. (post-VII, however, every main series FF game either is or will soon be available in the US). A few other big Square RPGs were released, like Chrono Trigger, and Seiken Densetsu II (Secret of Mana here). Sega, meanwhile, released their Phantasy Star games undeterred. What small following Japanese RPGs had in the states largely came from these games. As such, fans of JRPGs in the States at this point were largely Square fans. A few people remembered Dragon Warrior, but there simply weren't any new Dragon Warrior games that they could play.
FFVII was really the first JRPG to sell big numbers in the states. It's mostly because of FFVII's success that US publishers started taking JRPGs seriously and actually began to take the risk of translating them (a big, big job), and bringing them to the States. As for how FFVII singlehandedly DID all this? Well, call me a cynic, but:
Pretty CG. FFVII used the newfangled visuals to great effect, and it took that for a lot of people to take a story-based RPG seriously.
When DWVII came out in the US for the PS1, late in its life, nobody knew what to make of it, other than call it the biggest, longest Super NES game ever. Not too many people actually managed to get through the whole thing (i'm stuck about 50 hours in, myself), though occassionally I'll hear about somebody's friend who put 150 hours into the game and swears up and down that it's the greatest videogame ever made.
Years after the point, though, every game in the DQ series is available in English. Fans, disappointed by not having official DQV and VI releases, did the work themselves.
http://www.geocities.com/noprgress/trans.html
http://pt.parodius.com/dq5.html