A significant improvement over the original and almost certainly the best game in the "classic" series.

For one thing, Mega Man 2 had a whole lot more people work on it, but like the first game almost all of them were involved in the game's art and music rather than the design of the game itself. The music is even more memorable, the levels have animated background elements. Crash Man's stage has the player climbing up a tower as the sky in the background changes from blue to black to a field of stars.

One thing that I neglected to mention in my review of Mega Man was the magnet beam, a "weapon" that the player needed to find which allowed them to create a row of platforms directly in front of them. In Mega Man 2, this weapon is replaced by three items; a platform which latches onto and climbs up walls, a platform which floats in the air and slowly rises, and a platform that gives the player just enough time to hop on before moving horizontally at high speed. This is why Mega Man 2 is such an improvement in my eyes: a set of tools that is both more varied and more practical.

There are almost no boss weapons that wield as much usefulness in the Mega Man series as Metal Man and Quick Man's weapons do in this game. This seems to have been interpreted by Capcom as an issue, as Mega Man 3's Shadow Man gives the player a weapon that acts similar to Metal Blade, but with nerfed range and more limited directional control. In this game you can use Item 1 and 3 to get extra items, use Item 2 to skip the worst disappearing block section in Heat Man's stage, use Wood Man's shield to ride the tracks in Crash Man's stage without worrying about the enemies spawning nearby. Enemies out of reach of your normal attack can be targeted with the Metal Blade. Enemies that need to be dealt with quickly are best handled with the Quick Boomerang. Alternate routes can be opened with Crash Bombs.

In most Mega Man games there isn't really much of a reason to use certain weapons or items outside of the boss fight that they do extra damage towards. The fact that many of these weapons have so much ammo encourages the player to experiment, and the levels have hazards which can be dealt with effectively enough that experimentation feels rewarding.

I said in my Mega Man review that the problem with Mega Man is that bosses are often only ever unfairly hard or trivially easy; in this game most of the bosses are okay (and again most of their weaknesses make logical sense), Crash Man and Quick Man are pretty bad, Metal Man and Flash Man are pretty okay. The weapons in this game trivialize the bosses to such an extreme degree (sometimes killing the enemy in a single hit) that I can't even be upset. Because the number of hits the advantageous weapon take to kill a boss is so low, and the player only needs to be right once, the cost of trying different weapons isn't so high that a death in the face of experimentation will demoralize the player. This is the first game in the series to introduce the classic teleporting hatch boss rush. The boss fights at the end of the main stages truly serve as a place to experiment for this penultimate challenge, and a knowledgeable player will have an easy time with it.

That's the main draw of Mega Man 2 for me: it's a difficult game where supplementing even average mechanical skill with a good bit of knowledge can make that difficulty more than manageable.

Something I thought was interesting as I was browsing the MMKB wiki (so take it with a grain of salt I suppose) is that making this sequel wasn't a corporate decision, the Mega Man team decided to make a sequel on their own. It certainly feels like more of a passion project than any of the other games in the "classic" subseries of Mega Man.

I'll be frank: I never play this game without the Metal Blade. It's just so ridiculously fun but man is the game not balanced around this at ALL. Honestly I treat this game as an Easy Mode Contra game rather than a Mega Man because using Metal Blade (and sometimes Quick Boomerang and Bubble Lead) is just so doggone fun.

I'd rate this higher if this game didn't have some ridiculously stupid stuff like the door boss where you're screwed over if you die or don't have full or near full Crash Bomber ammo, or Air Man in general since you don't have slide in this game.