The reason for this comes down to gameplay design.
I've read articles singing the praises of the game's design and calling it an improvement on the first game in pretty much every way. I disagree for a number of reasons, but above all it comes down to counterplay. Counterplay is an old concept, but only recently has it really been given focus, and you can thank League of Legends developer Riot Games for that. For those who don't know what counterplay is, this video explains it better than I ever could:
Typically, as in that video, counterplay is used in discussion of multiplayer games. However, the concept is not actually multiplayer-specific. Any time a player acts in response to a threat counterplay is relevant, regardless of whether that threat comes from another player or the game itself.
Mega Man is a series all about counters. (I'm in danger of becoming very confusing here due to conflating terminology). In a sense, Mega Man games are part puzzle games. Your goal is to figure out the appropriate response to a given situation. And this is fine. Counterplay is not necessarily about having equally effective responses. The problem with Mega Man 2 is what those responses are. Firstly, what I call a "damage race".
A damage race is when two forces blindly wail on each other until one of them dies, so whoever does more damage faster wins. There's typically no diversity involved and little skill. Damage races rationally occur under two circumstances: When they are the best option, and when they are the only option. The presence of it as the best option is the main reason I think X5 and X6 have the weakest gameplay of the X series. The presence of it as the only option is why I think Mega Man 2 has the weakest gameplay of them all.
Your only effective choice is to kill the opponent faster than they can kill you. That sentence on its own doesn't sound like an issue; 'well, yeah, that's how fights work.' But that's where the issue of counterplay becomes important. Ideally, you'd have choices. 'Should I gambit and eat the hit to get off one of my own, or should I dodge? If I dodge, should I jump over or run under?' There are a number of circumstances in Mega Man 2 where you have no reasonable ability to avoid damage. Thus, this choice doesn't exist. It's gambit or die. No-damage runs for the game do exist, but they only work because of sheer speed at which the player murders the bosses.
Note a keyword there: "reasonable." That's a tricky topic to deal with due to how incredibly subjective it can be. The way I approach it is, how much does skill make a difference? Can you learn your way to success? Dark Souls is a game that does this beautifully, and you are likely to hear me sing its praises on this many more times to come. The brilliance of that game's design helped popularize another buzz term that is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about here: "fake difficulty". Here's a TV tropes page to explain the term. Please come back.
Mega Man 2 has a number of threats that can technically be dodged, but "reasonably" cannot. The Yellow Devil in the first Mega Man is a notoriously difficult boss, but at least with practice you could learn to reliably dodge his attacks.
(Pictured above: If Satan had jaundice.)
The average human reaction time is ~215ms. This is for an expected stimulus with a pre-planned response in an isolated setting. Take away any of those things and the time significantly rises. Reaction time can be trained, but only very slightly. Most improvement people see in reaction time is not an improvement in cognizant reaction time at all, but an improvement in either procedural memory (the reaction itself) or the ability to predict.
Prediction is a skill, and it can be learned to a high degree. However, it is also important to distinguish between prediction learned via skill and prediction learned via experience. Dark Souls, again, is a beautiful example of this done right. An attentive and intelligent player will be able to predict threats ahead based on stimuli that are not directly threatening, be it dialogue clues, a suspicious raised spot on the floor, or a big windup animation. The ability to learn through things other than direct experience (and in this case, failure) is sometimes cited as a hallmark of what intelligence as a species trait is. The term for such cues is "telegraphing", and it's another major part of the difference between "real" and "fake" difficulty. In contrast, here's that perfect run guy again complaining for four minutes about the boss that inspired me to write this post in the first place:
This boss, the Boobeam Trap, is like a poster child for bad gameplay design. Which is ironic, because observation and learning actually help you quite a bit in that fight. If you could reasonably dodge the attack, and had some way to refill your ammo at the cost of respawining the walls and boss (without dying, that is), it would actually be a pretty good puzzle.
Now that I've said all that, here's Extra Credits to say it again and rub this in:
But I'd like to repeat: Despite all that, it's still a good game, especially for its time. However, the series has advanced a lot since then. And when you take a good game and make it better, you get something pretty frickin awesome. If you have time to kill, here's another video discussing this:
There are a lot more things Mega Man X did to improve on the gameplay than that video touches on, and more than I'm going to touch on here, but I wanted to mention one thing that stood out to me when playing through these games, and contemplating why X5 and X6 seemed to have inferior gameplay to X1-4, despite all the new features that were introduced. And the answer I came up with was actually really simple: Bosses' attacks were more avoidable, and they had invincibility frames when hit. That's it. And it all goes back to the damage race, or lack thereof. Slower attacks meant that dodging was now a reasonable option, while invincibility frames mean that mindless wailing was not. Suddenly it mattered what attacks the bosses did, because your reaction would change with it, and that puzzle element of figuring out the best response could thrive. This mechanic is not specific to the Mega Man games: See if you can think of other examples of bosses that fit into these two categories, and how good those fights felt. Also consider invincibility frame's inverse, the vulnerability period, which accomplishes the same goal in another method.
And finally, we get to why I consider X4 to be the best in the series. It was the last X game (and so the one with the most features) and the only entry to have both X and Zero as fully playable characters to include these innovations and improvements from Mega Man X. Despite the fact that both characters honk like geese at different points in the game.
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