Great SRPG that's really newbie friendly to anyone new to the subgenre. Which i never expected at all so it was a pleasant surprise. Aside from its newbie-friendly nature, the gameplay also provide a great deal of options on how to tackle its encounters which is nice, though it doesn't really resonate with me personally. I guess, it has to do with the combat design not really having or perhaps communicating any clear direction on how to really excel at its gameplay. That would be why the gameplay bugs me. But what is there is fun enough to keep me going through the game so it's decent enough ye. The story is also solid with decent execution on its environmental themes and all that. Solid OST too if a bit underwhelming, considering how big a fan i am of the composers (Masahiro Andoh and Hirotaka Izumi of T-Square fame). Overall, it's a great game that hits all the major metric i look for in a JRPG/SRPG nicely, i just wasn't particularly hooked on it for some reason

Arc the Lad travels down the path of Shining Force as a story-driven tactical RPG with snippets of exploration, plus two noteworthy additions: A simple level-select map in place of the overworld, and a setting that evokes Final Fantasy VI's medieval-steampunk hybrid. The main attraction is not so much the story but the lush graphics and animations, where G-Craft (also responsible for the graphically impressive Front Mission) fully demonstrates their spriting prowess. Unfortunately, these visuals decorate rather plain gameplay, while its other areas are equally as lacking, from the generic cast to the short runtime and sequel-bait ending, from the hodgepodge of JRPG cliches to the insistent and preachy moral message.

So uneven it feels unfinished. The environments alternate between ultra-detailed backgrounds that eclipse anything on SNES and so-plain-it's ugly empty rooms; the story is bookended with incredibly affecting moments, but almost everything in between is generic fantasy filler. The main story is fairly short for an SRPG at around eight hours, but the side quests are all absurdly padded: a mission to clear the same two areas again and again until you've killed a hundred enemies between them; a fifty-floor bonus dungeon; and a 'battle tournament' in which you fight the same one-on-one duel against the same unchanging opponent over and over again, with rewards handed out when reach a winstreak of 10, 20, 40, 80, 120, 160, 200, and finally 1,000 wins. Who would actually do this? I can't help but feel like everything except the dungeon was added solely to pad the game out, and even that's made painfully slow by the need to manually navigate a unit to the exit of all fifty floors (and do it again on the way back up—you didn't think Arc the Lad I would give you a shortcut, did you?).

There are also balance issues. Most EXP comes from kills, so units who fall behind tend to stay behind; this is particularly problematic for Kukuru, a fragile spellcaster who doesn't get a spell that hits more than two tiles away until Lv. 20. On the other hand, completing even one sidequest will put your units so far ahead of the curve that the rest of the game becomes trivial.

There are interesting ideas here and there, like a Throw stat that determines the range of consumable items, but they can't save Arc the Lad I from mediocrity. Great soundtrack, though.