WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Dungeon Master II: Skullkeep
Publisher: JVC Developer: FTL Release: 1994
Considering the relatively recent shift in popularity of console RPGs, it's kind of easy to forget that a western RPG on home console was a bit of an oddity during the 16-bit days. And when they did happen they were almost always very poor ports of PC games that normally required much more powerful hardware. The result was almost always a stuttering, near-unplayable mess of a game.
Even if you could get past that, though, if you were like me you'd likely still have issues. Anyone who played games predominantly on consoles back then had been bred on RPGs like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series – very linear, heavily story-based, and relatively user-friendly. Western (read: PC) RPGs tended to be all about open worlds and very exploration heavy. Go anywhere, fight anything, pick up absolutely everything (no matter how useless). To me they felt completely overwhelming.
It's funny that in the years since both extremes have kind of moved towards the middle.
Anyway, Dungeon Master II suffers from every problem I've listed above. As the game was obviously designed to be controlled via mouse input, the port simply included a free cursor that could be moved by the Genesis' controller's d-pad. Not an elegant interface, to be sure.
Luckily, movement is simplified a little bit in that you can simply hold the C button while pushing in a direction to control your team. For everything else, though – from inventory management to combat – is crippled by the slow-moving cursor and imprecise navigation controls.
But that fits with the rest of the game, anyway. Movement is very slow, with the odd extremely long load time in between steps.
Visually things aren't much better. The Genesis' limited color pallette always had trouble with very dark games, and Dungeon Master II is a very dark game. Early on you'll spend a lot of time outdoors, in the middle of a driving thunderstorm. What should be an impressive, atmospheric weather effect comes off as a muddy mess.
Dungeon Master II is a bit of oddity, though, in that it is a western RPG developed by an established western company (Faster Than Light Games) that, for some reason or another, was released on Japanese computers almost two years before it saw the light of day in other parts of the world. And as we all know, two years is an eternity in this indusstry. By the time Dungeon Master II hit the rest of the world it looked and felt extremely dated.
This situation was even more strange considering the 1987 original was really popular, garnering a huge list of awards and being the best-selling product of all time on the Atari ST computer.
Either way, it appears that Dungeon Master II: Skullkeep was FTL's swan song. According to wikipedia, there was only ever one subsequent game released under the FTL banner after this one – Dungeon Master Nexus, a Japanese exclusive for the Sega Saturn. And it's unclear whether FTL had anything to do with this release. It may well have been developed by publisher Victor Interactive.