YMMV / Mega Man II

• Anti-Climax Boss: While Quint's backstory should set him up to be the most dramatic boss fight in the game, the battle itself is an absolute cinch. His only attack is jumping around on the Sakugarne, the attack doesn't do much damage even if it hits Mega Man, and he leaves himself wide open to attack after every jump.
• Fridge Brilliance: What ability did Mega Man get from defeating Dr. Wily? The giant missile used to shoot Dr. Wily's ship down during his attempted escape! This also creates a Loophole Abuse situation of Mega Man circumventing the first Law of Robotics (that Dr. Wily took advantage of in Mega Man 7) because he wasn't targeting Wily directly, just his ship.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Metal Man's Metal Blade returns from the NES game, and is once again the best weapon in the game for many of the same reasons as before, namely that it can fire in eight directions, hits hard, and has a low ammo cost. It's arguably even better than it was in the NES version, as here, it's effective against almost every enemy in the game, while the NES version had quite a few enemies that were immune to it.
  • Rush Jet functions like it did in Mega Man 3, and as such, can allow Mega Man to fly anywhere on the screen with very little limitation. It consumes energy even more slowly than it did in Mega Man 3 as well.
  • The Rush Marine actually isn't overpowered in and of itself, but makes it possible to bypass large parts of Wood Man's and Top Man's levels with ease due to how the levels are designed. It's a little more understandable with Wood Man's level, since it's not guaranteed that you'll have the Rush Marine there, but you definitely will have it in Top Man's level.
• Good Bad Bugs: Health and ammo refills don't pause the game like they normally do when picked up. You can exploit this with ammo refills by switching weapons during its activity to split the tank down the middle.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The controversy over the ending of Mega Man 7 can come across like this when you consider that this game's ending features Mega Man blasting Dr. Wily out of the stars and causing his spacecraft to crash to Earth with a massive explosion. On top of that, the ludicrously huge mushroom cloud that results is very reminiscent of the ending of Alien: Resurrection.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Mega Man 10 got a lot of flack for including an "Easy" mode, and some fans even hold disdain for Mega Man 2 NES's "Normal" mode, so you can probably guess how they reacted to a game where the only difficulty was extremely easy.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: While the game is technically longer than Dr. Wily's Revenge, with nine stages to that game's six, the low difficulty means that most stages can be beaten without the need to practice them first, making it entirely possible to beat the entire game in under an hour, even on the first try.
• Obvious Beta: The game had less than a year (possibly even less than five months) of development, and glitchy collision detection, bland level design, a strange plot, and poor sound quality stand as proof of it.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This game actually showed Mega Man using Rush to fly through space several years before he did it in Mega Man V.
  • This was also the first game in the franchise to fill Mega Man's health and weapon energy in real time without pausing the action, something not done in the main series until Mega Man 8.
• Scrappy Weapon: Not only does Mega Man get damaged whenever he uses the Sakugarne, it's only really useful in the game's final battle. Even then, it isn't necessary at all, and arguably even makes the battle harder than just chipping away at Wily with the Mega Buster.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Put it this way — it's like the developers found Mega Man 2 way too difficult, so they imported the Mega Man 2 version just so they could play it on its easy mode...and then decided that was still too difficult! Though even without the decidedly easy level designs, the introduction of Energy Tanks and Rush makes the challenge much more reasonable than in the previous game.
• So Okay, It's Average: While a weak game by the standards of the Mega Man series, compared to the Game Boy's library in general it's actually not too bad, only really suffering from a lack of challenge and A poorly-rendered soundtrack.
• Sophomore Slump: Granted, few consider Dr. Wily's Revenge to be one of the all-time best Mega Man games, but it's still generally regarded as being way better than this one. The three following Game Boy ones are considered much better games than this and the previous one.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Air Man's theme is a soundalike of Bubble Man's theme from the NES version, but at a higher pitch.
  • Wood Man’s theme uses a very similar melody as Top Man’s theme in the NES version, as well.
• Tear Jerker: Needle Man and Hard Man’s themes are oddly melancholy and sad to listen to. That goes double for the title theme/final stage theme.
• That One Boss:
  • Unusually considering the Sequel Difficulty Drop, Crash Man actually manages to be much harder than in his NES appearance. His weakness is still to the Air Shooter, but this time around he can only be damaged by one of its three blasts (all three could hit him in the NES version), meaning it takes much longer to kill him. The smaller room size also leaves less room to dodge his attacks (or Crash Man himself).
  • Magnet Man is a lot harder than his NES incarnation as well. In addition to taking up more of the screen than before, he takes less damage from most weapons, and his jump starts a lot more quickly. His Magnet Missile burst leaves very little space for the player to dodge, too.
  • Needle Man's every bit the aggressive combatant that he was in 3, but this time you have less room to move around, and his needles block your shots.
  • This game's Wily Machine can be a nasty shock after an otherwise pretty easy experience. Not only is its attack pattern extremely difficult to avoid — with the game's Hitbox Dissonance making it even worse — but your only options for damaging it are either your Mega Buster, which takes forever to wear down its health, or the Sakugarne, which actually damages Mega Man at an even faster rate than it does the Wily Machine.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Quint was never given the chance to develop in this game. He is a kidnapped Mega Man from the future remodeled into Quint, charged with defeating present-day Mega Man. But he doesn't do anything in this game besides jump around on his jackhammer/pogostick and after his defeat, he just teleports away. Later games that had Quint make cameo appearances never expanded on his character outside one note that Quint dislikes time paradoxes.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Lampshaded. Dr. Wily stole a time machine, traveled thirty years into the future, and kidnapped the future Mega Man and reprogrammed him to a Mega Man killer named Quint. What does this brilliant paradox-causing plan amount to? Wily coming back to the present day with the rebuilt Robot Masters from Mega Man 2 and 3 and Quint jumping around on a pogo stick/jackhammer. Time travel was never really explored beyond Wily going into the future to rebuild older Robot Masters and get Quint.