- Absurdly Short Production Time: Even with it being made during the developers' spare time, Mega Man 2 had a strict deadline, and was finished in only three months. This rushed production meant that the team weren't able to properly fine-tune bosses nor playtest the weapons to the extent they otherwise would have.
- Breakthrough Hit: While the first Mega Man was well received, it didn't sell well and made little impact. This game helped put the Blue Bomber (and by extension, Capcom and Keiji Inafune) on the gaming map.
- Christmas Rushed: Mega Man 2's team was only given a meager three months to complete the entire game for a release on Dec. 24 1988, with the staff working 20 hour work days just to meet the deadline, while working on other major titles for Capcom at the same time. The final result was worth it.
- Doing It for the Art: The game was really a rogue production made on the team's own time, due to the low sales of the original game not giving Capcom faith that the series would become a big franchise. On top of that, the game was given a tiny deadline of three to four months. Keiji Inafune summed it up in a 2004 interview;"So we, of our own accord, got together, spent our own time, we worked really, really hard, you know, just 20-hour days to complete this, because we were making something we wanted to make. Probably in all my years of actually being in a video game company, that was the best time of my working at Capcom, because we were actually working toward a goal, we were laying it all on the line, we were doing what we wanted to do. And it really showed in the game, because it's a game, once again, that we put all our time and effort and love, so to speak, into it, designing it."
- Dummied Out:
- Enemies are coded to drop E-Tanks among other items when killed, and are seen doing so in pre-release footage, but this never occurs in-game, nor in any following Mega Man game.
- Among Crash Man's tileset is a unique structure resembling a large shielded Metall. It's commonly thought to have been intended as a spawner for Neo Metalls (which appear in Crash Man's stage), but no object coding for such a thing exists.
- Wood Man's stage contains two unused palettes, intended to be used after shooting the trees with the Atomic Fire (a feature that was ultimately cut).
- Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: In 2018, in honor of the franchise's 30th anniversary, the game was re-released in a limited 8,500 cartridge production run on the NES. Most of these cartridges are opaque light blue, though 1,000 of them are a special translucent, glow-in-the-dark blue.
- No Export for You: The Wily Wars remake, sans its brief Sega Channel release. The only other American re-release it has received is the Sega Genesis Ultimate Portable Player device as a built-in game. The Complete Works port also got stuck in Japan (but was used as the source code for the Anniversary Collection port regardless) before it, among the first four games, was added to the PlayStation Network.
- Official Fan-Submitted Content: Mega Man 2 was the first game to run a boss design contest where fans could submit designs for the eight Robot Masters, though the short development cycle meant that the stages were created first, with a loose idea of what kind of boss would be needed for each one. Around 8,370 entries were received, and future games would see the number increase exponentially.
- Only Barely Renewed: After the first game's lukewarm performance, Capcom only greenlit a sequel on the condition that the team only worked on it when they weren't working on other projects, and gave them only three months to make it. It proved to be more than worthwhile in the end.
- Permanent Placeholder: According to Akira Kitamura, the three transport tools were supposed to be given proper names, yet the provisional "Item #" names remained in the final product.
- Refitted for Sequel:
- This was the first game to implement eight Robot Masters after it couldn't be done in the first Mega Man.
- The Mecha Dragon was initially designed for the original Mega Man, but was left out due to technical limitations before being resurrected as the first Wily stage boss.
- Bubble Man was originally planned to be a robot master in the first game before being replaced by Ice Man in development.
- What Could Have Been:
- The possibility of weapons being used to affect the environment and enemies
was brought up (with the Atomic Fire setting the trees in Wood Man's stage on fire and destroying the Battons nesting in them being but one example), but was largely dropped. * Ironically, such ideas would be brought back for later games like Mega Man 7 as well as the Mega Man X series. - The Picopico-kun boss was originally harder, as the gaps left by pieces that fly together would've become bottomless pits, leaving less and less room for the player to stand on (similar to what the Block Devil in Mega Man 10 would eventually do). In the final game, however, solid floors remain in place over where parts used to be.
- Earlier names for Bubble Man were Pump Man and Ocean Man. The name Pump Man would be used by a different robot master in Mega Man 10.
- The possibility of weapons being used to affect the environment and enemies
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