I believe I’ve referenced my feelings on the original Mega Man franchise before in other revisiting posts on here, but I’ll do it again now. To me, the Mega Man franchise peaked with Mega Man 3. Now I know I’m in the minority as virtually everyone else who is familiar with the first few games will cite 2 as being the best.
Let’s Play Mega Man 4:
Okay, hear me out one last time. To me, 3 was slightly superior because it tweaked and improved on a number of things which were a bit loose in 2, and the soundtrack was just as good if not better. There’s not much else to point to to distinguish one MM game from another.
So that’s why I can draw a very clear curve which charts the highwater mark of the original MM franchise. That highwater mark is at 3 for me, surpassing 2 by a bit, but 4 dips down and plots and right around where 2 was for me.
So all this to say, I think although the two are decidedly different (at least in the scope of Mega Man games), Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 4 are pretty much equal in terms of quality.
Mega Man 4 introduced the Megabuster and kept everything which was working through the previous games. The music was just as good as ever with some of my favorites from the franchise belonging to this game (Dust Man, certain Cosack and Wiley Stages, etc.), as well.
The only thing working against Mega Man 4 to me was that it was so similar to Mega Man 3 that it began to get redundant. So yes, maybe Mega Man 4 was the “jumping the shark” moment for the franchise. But remember, the episode of Happy Days where Fonzi jumped the shark was still memorable and folks didn’t fall off until a bit later on. There was just a lot of sizzle jammed into one game, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I think what I’m trying to say is that you don’t need to play any Mega Man games from the original franchise after 4, because they’re all rehashes of the first four at that point. 4 is just unique enough to get away with whatever it does. If you’re not sated after MM4, move on to the X franchise, like I’ll probably play next, well before I play 5.