More polished with tighter controls compared to Mega Man 1. The main 8 robot master stages are actually pretty great with some iconic music, but the design in the Wily Castle stages is even more questionable than the first game. They exacerbate the issue with Mega Man 2 where most of the game is pretty easy besides a few random massive difficulty spikes, also wtf is that boobeam trap boss? (once I learned how to do it I can do the fight pretty consistently with even a shot to spare, but I still don't like it conceptually).

Overall MM2 deserves its reputation as a step forward for the Mega Man series - the one that all successors would be based on, but surprisingly I did prefer some aspects of MM1, such as the more evenly spread difficulty and better balanced weapons in that game.