Genre: RPG
Developer: Vir2L Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Artists from the Morrowind team apparently created the graphics for this title, and I would believe it; the characters are well drawn and have the same aesthetic style as their 3d counterparts from Morrowind. Also, the dungeon floors, walls, and ceilings are equally impressive. Unfortunately, the entire dungeon looks exactly the same, featuring boring pewter-colored brick walls. A little variety would have gone a long way in making the game more interesting, and the dungeon more navigable.

Like some other J2ME games, this title is completely silent, hence the lack of a score here.

In deciding how to represent the Elder Scrolls world to J2ME users, the game developers decided to take the "Nethack/dungeon crawler" path. The D-pad moves you around one grid space at a time, with left and right rotating your character at 90-degree angles, ala Shining in the Darkness. You can equip a melee weapon and a spell, talk to NPCs, and, as per the other Elder Scrolls games, increase your stats when you level up your major and minor skills. The dungeon layout itself is just an arbitrary mess of hallways in all directions, with little to no creativity.

It's a very treacherous mountain to climb in developing a dungeon crawler, because it's so difficult to make them interesting. Vir2L Studios failed in this aspect; the completely uniform dungeon, the lack of any sound, and the short cast of baddies makes for a pretty dull experience after the first hour or two. There is also an annoying, frequently recurring bug that crashes the game in the menus. If you have patience, there is some depth here, but instead of a dungeon crawler, I can think of numerous other, more fun directions they could have taken The Elder Scrolls on J2ME.