Eugh, no. If "Ultima 1" offered some semblances of questing and dungeon crawling to serve as a diversion, Ultima II doesn't even give you the courtesy of a goal. It is deservingly the black sheep of the franchise.

Richard Garriott was a bit too inspired by the film Time Bandits, and he placed the setting in our own planet Earth where you can travel through different time periods utilising time gates(think of them as predecessors to moon gates), to hop from one time frame to the next, including pangea time, medieval time, modern time, post-apocalyptic time, and a time-beyond-time which contains the stronghold of Minax the Enchantress, a disciple of Mondain from the first game and this game's antagonist. The time gates mechanic could have easily made for a game that's interesting at least as a framework, but the core gameplay of Ultima 1 has been additionally tampered with to make a depressing experience.

Now, here are all the things the game does wrong:
1. Grinding is not rewarding. The enemy dodge mechanics are way too good for what they represent at the lowest character level, and you'll waste a lot of time missing your shots at enemies. Upon beating them too, their drop of experience and loot is quite miniscule, and the entire game boils down to hacking enemies in the overworld to gain gold, items, and experience.
2. The dungeons are made obsolete. Any item you could possibly get from the dungeons is transfered to random overworld drops, and there are no quests that demand diving into dungeons anymore. Even as archaic as they were in "Ultima 1" and "Akalabeth", they were certainly the most interesting part of the game, but in here they were demoted to an optional quest that any player with common sense skips entirely.
3. Over-reliance on one-use-only items. There are many random drops that the game specifically demands you build a stock of for many sequences, including depletable keys(you'd need a stock of at least 50), magical time-stopping coins which are necessary to get past the final stretch of enemies, exotic items that allow you to travel through space in a rocket(yes, that's still a thing), and a whole slew of little, critical items you just can't get enough of.
4. Lack of NPC communication. The NPCs rarely dispense you hints that are revelant or clue you in to story details, and nevermind that the world is uncreatively populated by depraved stock characters that utter one-liners long before Skyrim turned it into a meme. When you're walking into the world, you don't get the sense you're talking to characters rather than visiting a post-apocalyptic world of cardboard cut-outs. The universe in Ultima II feels empty and dead.

"Ultima II" is like a fascinating, but nauseating fever dream that is the product of what teenage fantasy and high hormones would make as an awkwardly diced-up program, which you can either consider a true purveyor of punk ideals, or an incoherent mess of adolescent world views: The game is rife with pop-cultural references of the zeitgeist, from cameos by various pop stars to the corny Cold War subjects and the villification of the Soviets. Fortunately, from this nadir Ultima would be going on a steady climb of high points where every game would be better than the last, at least to "Ultima VIII". The lore of Ultima really only begins at the 3rd game and playability at 4th, but this one is best left under a drawer in Richard Garriott's bedroom and we'd best forget this confusing mess of a game that wasn't sure what it wanted to be does not necessitate an Ultima marathoner's playthrough. Ideally someone could take Ultima II's plot frame, and tailor it to the much more fairer mechanics of Ultima IV or V.