I hadn't watched 2 or 3 since they happened, so I thought maybe rewatching them after 4 could change my opinion. So I watched 1 and 2 last night and just finished with 3 and 4.
My rankings going in were 1 > 4 > 3 > 2.
Really the only thing that changed is I forgot how good 2 was. The story of 3 wasn't as tightly woven as I remember it being (why did I remember Kenny doing a V-Trigger out of nowhere right at the opening bell?) and 4 felt a little randomly put together in the middle (although that can be chalked up to Kenny's desperation after dropping the first fall like he did), so I think 2 jumps them. However they're all absolutely brilliant in their own ways.
2 felt a bit like three or four stories taped together. Obviously they had to fill time to get to 60 minutes, but it almost felt like they just got together in a room one day and were like "Ok, lets come up with all the cool spots and sequences we can and put them together in an order that makes sense". This leads to it feeling like a play in four acts: act one being Kenny focusing on Okada's knee for the first third of the match, act two being Okada getting a bit more desperate and brutalizing Kenny a bit more, act three being the ordeal with Cody running down with the towel, and act four being the final stretch where they just both run out of steam. In light of that, these acts did flow into each other very well (with the exception of them completely abandoning Okada's knee 20 minutes in) and those cool sequences were arguably the best chain wrestling of the feud.
Watching 3 when it happened, I just remember being super hype that whole month because the G1 was so good. I was actually spoiled to the result of this match the morning before I watched it, but I didn't care because I knew it was going to be amazing. Watching it now, I started to think that it almost looked a little sloppy, but to be fair, it was on the tail end of the brutal G1 schedule, and I had been watching the whole thing so I had been getting used to everyone's bodies breaking down as it went on. So needless to say, on a rewatch this match is the least crisp of the four, but that gets made up for with the sheer feeling of emotion the whole match exudes. The frantic pace, the selling, it all did such a good job at displaying how much they both just wanted to win as quickly as possible, and while the weakest of the feud, the G1 match still manages to etch its own niche.
When I was thinking about 2 being split up into three 20 minute sections, my mind immediately went to "Well that's how 4 should have been", so on my rewatch of the 2/3 falls match, I was specifically looking for the specific stories that each fall told. The first fall was about how well they knew each other, how pretty much anything they tried would be countered and to be effective they had to throw some unexpected moved in, and how it seemed Kenny with his superior conditioning was taking control only to have Okada catch him by surprise with a cradle to steal the fall. The second fall, in contrast, was about Kenny losing his confidence after getting rolled up and starting to get desperate and sloppy, only for Okada to be too worn down to be able to capitalize on his mistakes. Eventually Kenny settles down and wins the second fall, and the story of the third fall builds on Okada's side of the second in that they're both absolutely spent, and even though they're able to counter each other's moves, they're just too tired to string anything together without getting countered again, until Kenny finally pulls through in the end. I felt like this one had a chance of me being like "Wow, this is really boring" expecially after watching nearly two hours of the rest of the matches, but no, I wouldn't say it's worse at all, it just felt...different than the others somehow.
1's still perfect, fight me.
1 > 2 > 4 > 3, with 2, 4, and 3 extremely close to each other.
Nobody's gonna care about me gushing about my weaboo wrestling.