I actually bought Arcania because I am a collector and needed to own it (yeah, dumb, whatever). It's pretty f'ing terrible.
The combat and world look nice, I made it through the first town out over the water and it was nice looking. Wacky-wacky combat like Oblivion, it worked. What made the game truly crappy were two things: 1) no exploration, which is just a killer in RPGs... the whole game is linear, and 2) terrible, TERRIBLE voice acting and writing. An RPG needs a basic story and some coherent dialogue, I don't care how decent the gameplay is.
I give Oblivion a hard time for having a crap plot and poor writing, but Arcania makes Oblivion seem like Planescape.