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.