Welcome to the Grouvee forum, mbrown! And thanks for sharing your thoughts on Power Strike II. I think this can be considered one of those games–like many 8-bit era games–that was great for its time but can be hard to go back to nowadays when the genre in question has seen so many improvements over the decades since. I’ll need to play some more before I expound on this, and perhaps I should check on what other shoot-em-ups were releasing in 1993 and the years prior for fair comparisons. Power Strike II might be a bit of a standout in that there were plenty of 16-bit shooters by that time, but was a really late release for hardware of the previous generation.
I recommend these game guides to the Master System, if you want to dive in further!
For an RPG that was ahead of its time and still holds up, I think it’s worth checking out Phantasy Star. The best way to play it now is via the Sega Ages digital release on the Switch, which offers some quality of life improvements to cut out most of the grinding and automatically create maps for the dungeon mazes.
For a platformer, you can’t go wrong with Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap. (A precursor to Monster World IV.) There was a remake of Dragon’s Trap released for all modern consoles, giving it a beautiful fresh coat of paint. If you end up enjoying Monster World IV at all, I strongly recommend looking into this one at some point.
From the Master System, I also like to recommend Master of Darkness. It’s a ripoff of the original Castlevania, but it’s a great ripoff of the original Castlevania. =P