And X1 is an almost perfectly designed game that gets all of this right. The X series on the other hand has much more fast paced and agile gameplay with the dashing and wall jumping which is best leveraged by multi-directional scrolling in more open ended exploratory stages. This was something 7 and 8 diminished by increasing the size of the sprites but the games' resolutions hadn't really increased much from the NES originals (in fact the SNES resolution is exactly the same as the NES), and I think the gameplay was worse off from that. They also kept the screen locked to scrolling only 1 direction at a time and building the level design with obstacles and enemy encounters around that, while for a few select rooms they added multi-directional scrolling to add some variety.
They maintained the distinct classic MM feel by having lots of screen real estate relative to the character sizes. I really liked Mega Man 11 and felt it was the best post 8-bit sequel by a pretty wide margin. They seemed to have an easier time iterating on the classic Mega Man formula in interesting ways while the X sequels quickly became much more meandering in comparison.
