Yeah, Messiah is like an RPG. An action game with RPG elements, set in the world of Ashan.
As for the foreignness, I'm not sure. In my opinion, the styles of Heroes 5 and other games set in Ashan sometimes blend quite well.
Of course, there's a difference in detail. But that's more of a problem with Heroes 5. No matter how great it is in terms of style, the angularity of the armor is undeniable. Nowadays, you can do better and still maintain the overall look and feel.
The angularity is due to the limitations of the GPUs available in 2004-2005. At that time, the GF5200 was the de facto standard for most computers, and the game had to run on such a video card... My brother had a top-of-the-line GF6600 PCI-Ex at the time, and the performance compared to my GF5200 (and later GF5600) was like night and day. And when he bought two GF7600s in SLI, it was just amazing at 1280x1024, while I could barely manage 1024x768!
