Linguistic Dragon has published one final article concerning Ultima 2, a playthrough of which he recently completed:

I stated in my opening thoughts for Ultima II that I viewed the game as the series equivalent of the book of Leviticus – the first major potential stumbling block for anybody trying to proceed through canon in order. (Numbers is also an apt comparison. Any of the last three books of the Pentateuch, really, there’s something in there for everyone to trip over.) While I still think the metaphor holds a decent amount of water, now that I’ve played it right off the tail end of Ultima I and am preparing to go into Ultima III, it’s become fairly evident to me that more than anything else, Ultima II is a transition stage, the ‘awkward adolescent’ of the series, trying to figure out exactly what it wants to be and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks in order to do so.

It’s a fairly lengthy article, and well worth the read in full. Do click on through and give it one of those. Here’s Linguistic’s overall thoughts:

…this is still the era where game stories are pretty simplistic by their very nature, and when it comes down to it Ultima II’s story isn’t much different than Ultima I’s – at their core, they’re both the ‘here is a baddie, now build yourself up to the point where you can beat them’ type of tale. The differences are in their execution, and Ultima I pulls it off better. While Ultima I is streamlined, dropping hints at regular intervals, revealing relevant game information with the completion of each king’s quest, Ultima II basically relegates this intel to random oracle readings and dependent on finding the one townsperson that reveals a hint. While this does take a step to a more ‘nautral’ feel, plying the locals for knowledge and squealing with glee when you finally find the one who knows what you need to know, it’s not quite perfected the method – again, the bad pacing created by game elements hurts the story here.

As far as its place in the Grand Ultima Story, that’s hard to say. It’s probably the most glossed-over game in the series besides the semi-canon Akalabeth prologue. I do think that it does set up a very nice pattern of retaliation, though – the fact that events do lead to consequences that the Stranger-slash-Avatar has to deal with. It’s something of an overarching theme of the series as a whole, whether it was intentional or not – practically every game after the first deals with some sort of after-effect of the previous games, and that’s begun here in Ultima II. We’re still in the opening chapters of the series, but it’s already establishing precedent of needing to deal with the repercussions of actions taken, for better or worse. And for that, even if it gets mostly hurried over in the rest of the Ultima canon, I think Ultima II is a rather pivotal point in the story of Ultima.

“Glossed over” is a good way to put it. It’s certainly the first Ultima I’d choose to skip, all things being equal.