Blade Dancer is too slow to be an action RPG, and too light to be a full-fledged RPG.
However, the first thing I noticed was how slowly your character runs about the town. Unfortunately, this sluggishness expands through every aspect of the game. The first few "deliver this for me" quests are fine for an intro to an RPG, but combined with the sllooowww run through the very large town, your patience will be tested.
Combat is done in a pseudo-real-time mode much like Final Fantasy, but the time between actions (where you literally do nothing but watch the time tick away) seems infinite. Also, in each area, the battles couldn't be much more generic -- there's a very limited number of monsters, and while some cast spells, the visual/audio effects of the spells is very basic and not exactly thrilling to watch.
As for character development -- there isn't any. Outside of the nice object creation mechanic, your character's stats are completely out of your control and level automatically.
The plot was not bad, but I gave up on the game before getting about half way through.
The visuals, music and some of the voice-over work is decent -- it's too bad the base gameplay didn't support it, or we may have ended up with an RPG worth our time.