I think this game is an interesting product of its time, but for sure a lot is left to be desired. The storytelling is as basic as it gets, not really much to go off of besides some random side-quests that aren't really necessary to proceed and a very basic plot where you find some pieces of the staff of chaos and then a final fight with Jagar Tharn really - It's not very compelling. the only time I decided to find an artifact was just to search for the Oghma Infinium which literally just lets you get free levels and allocate more skill-points to your build. The cutscenes are also very goofy but I found them charming.

The combat is pretty cool but obviously jank and I personally believe ranged builds are superior in general. Magic is definitely busted but I personally can't justify trying any other build due to the fact that enemies like hellhounds will just spam their own ranged magic attack and do massive damage unless you have a spell that absorbs magic attacks or cast a shield. Spell creation is incredibly cool though it's very easy to exploit - but at least it's really fun to abuse it. The scale of the game itself is incredibly ambitious and it's amazing to think about, but at the same time exploring towns and whatnot feels very samey because once you've see the few variations between them, you've seen all of them, and finding taverns and shops can be a chore - alongside some bugs that disincentivise you from repairing equipment at blacksmiths since your weapon or armour can just disappear. At that point I'd just buy new armour rather than repair anything.

The dungeon crawling definitely isn't my favourite, the first few were pretty cool but at some point they became so massive and tiring to get through that it became a chore for me and it became pretty frustrating to the point I'd need to take so many breaks. The riddles were fun though, very D&D and a bit of a brainteaser, no complaints there.
The races themselves are not as varied in terms of appearance when taking the future games into consideration, and in the overworld all you have to go off of is the skin colour and clothing, and it sucks that a bunch of the races are just kinda *worse* build-wise in contrast to others. But who knows maybe I'm just bad and all of them are usable, is what it is and in the future they get more fleshed out I suppose.

Overall it's a pretty decent game and I can say give it a go, I'm not particularly good at these sorts of games but I consider myself fairly patient so I stuck it out and had my fair share of fun. I personally got halfway through the game and found that was enough for me since the dungeon crawling genuinely got so tedious at some point, they're just too big for me and I generally just don't like exploring labyrinthian levles in any game, however I can forgive Arena a bit due to its age and ambitious pre-generative nature. Gonna try and get into Daggerfall at some point since I hear it's a lot more fleshed out but yeah.

Really awesome and unique game. Not for the faint of heart. I wish there were more games like this (minus the 1994 jank of course).

The beginning of a legend.