Brandish includes this minor female character, Dola, and she shows up once or twice through the course of the adventure — and, naturally, her image is plastered across all the promo art, the box art, the soundtrack art. The hero you play as for 20 hours, Ares? You never see him anywhere. My assumption is that he got dizzy from the world constantly spinning around him and had to go for a lie down.
Spinning the world like that is just like a very, very poor man’s version of today’s third-person action/shooter, with a hero who is always facing forward while the camera is the one that changes.
Anyways, sounds like a fascinating game, one that I had never heard of.
If you are comfortable with light Japanese text (menus, items, solving a few minor riddles) I highly recommend the PSP remake, which makes the whole thing incredibly playable and fun. There was some talk of Xseed localizing it, but that seems to have fallen through, alas.