I dunno - Mega Man 9 has the shop feature, none of the stages have really frustrating segments (Wily 1, Plug and Tornado are probably the worst offenders), every weapon is not only useful but good, there's a save feature, and the game is quite short. Plus you have unlimited continues. I'd say that 9 is harder than 2 and 4-7, but easier than the rest.

Beating the bosses in the proper order is the important thing in any Megaman Game but even more so in 1, cuz it's nearly impossible to beat them any other way.

And the ending is just brutal, especially the mega man clones. But once your used to the game, it becomes easier.

I miss the difficulty in the really Megaman games.

I remember playing MMZ for the GBA and being really disappointed in th ending.  I got to the final boss and beat it without getting hit once.  I'm like "well that was easy, what's next" when the credits start going.  I couldn't believe that was the boss.  I didn't have to heal.  I didn't have to restart and try again.  I didn't have to memorize its patterns with retries, I just ran through and killed it without even breaking a sweat.

What?  I thought 2 was one of the easier ones?

Diffculty wise i'd go

9,1,6,5,7,3,2,4.  (never played 8.)

Of course maybe I just thing 2,3 and 4 were so easy because they were the ones i replayed the most.

Also outside of 1 and 9 I wouldn't even say the Megaman games were hard.

Yeah, only the so-called "überhard HC games" seem to put up a fight these days. Hell, you can put games like FFXII on automatic and let it fight for you!

But then again - a lot of the difficulty of many ye olde games came from technical constraints and harebrained design, instead of being well-designed and challenging at the same time.

2 IS one of the easier ones. The only tougher stage is the Quickman laser gauntlet (which isn't THAT hard, honestly), everyone is weak to the buster, Metal Blade is the most overpowered weapon ever in MM games, and the bosses are easy except for the two trick-based ones.

As a Mega Man geek, I'd arrange the games as such, from hardest to easiest:

1,3,8,9,7,4,2,6,5

3 has the brutal Doc Robot stages, 8 has the Jump Jump Slide Slide BS and no E-tanks, and 7 has the hardest MM boss fight ever (the only challenging thing in the entire game).

I still haven't beaten Megaman 1. Its mostly due to being forced back when hit. I think they added a short duration of invincibility to fix that in Mega man 2. As for mega man 9's difficulty its mostly due to navigating the environment not the enemies them selves. I have yet to pass that first part of willy's castle (MM9) with the lava beams or what ever.

if you don't use a walkthrough I would say that Metroid is harder...Mega Man games usually start out pretty hard then after you get the lay of the stages and bosses you can beat any of them fairly easily...for example when Mega Man 9 came out for WiiWare my first time was close to four hours the second time I beat it it was an hour and 15 minutes and the third time I beat it in about 52 minutes

Sorry if you misunderstood.  I actually like the original Mega Man X quite a bit.  It has superb music and is a lot of fun to play.  However, as the series went on it got worse...as I said I feel X4 is extremely poor as are the ones following it.

I think Battletoads and Ghosts 'N Goblins are the hardest NES games that I've played (I've played most of them).  I've gotten close to beating Battletoads, but failed.  I can't even get close on G-N-G (this is coming from someone who has beaten Ghouls 'N Ghosts and Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts).