>>12564112
Only the aspect of the expectation of frequent deaths before the player has a grasp/mastery of the gameplay.

The RPG elements are WAY too complicated for anything that was ever in arcades.
The movement, combat, and general environment interaction was pretty much in line with PC gaming at the time, slightly better in some respects.
The randomness of in-game activities was much different than anything from arcades.
Even the very loose story was way tighter than even the most narrative-driven arcade games.

The only argument for it having "arcade" gameplay is that runs can be relatively short and more recently those kinds of games have been described as "arcade gameplay."
>old "arcade"
got your ass handed to you over bullshit in order to eat your quarters
>new "arcade"
you didn't 20 hours in a tutorial simulator just to spend half of it in cutscenes that led nowhere in a rushed third act because the studio ran out of money

No it has PC gameplay

>>12564112
It's very light in roleplaying for RPGs, but I can't think of any arcade game which has even this level of roleplaying, and though the game isn't that long, it's still a lot longer than what you expect from arcade games. In fact, Diablo really lets you take your time, which isn't what arcade or arcade-like games tend to do.

The proper term for Diablo is Dungeon Crawler, and it's one very strongly informed by computer game Roguelikes such as Moria and Angband, it was even outright turnbased earlier during development, with permadeath and everything.
You could even call Diablo a Roguelike, though purists will insist that true Roguelikes are strictly turnbased.

>>12564146
>The movement, combat, and general environment interaction was pretty much in line with PC gaming at the time, slightly better in some respects.
It's a well done game, but there were PC RPGs before it which were much more deep and complex in both RPG mechanics, and actual roleplaying. The more stripped down and simple nature of the first Diablo made it pretty well suited for porting to Playstation (and it's a fairly full port, like 95% close), because it can be pretty comfortably played with a gamepad like that.