[PAC-MAN Museum+ 8/14]

Wow. This rules. One of my absolute favorite takes on the original PAC-MAN formula, second only to Championship Edition DX. It stays very true to the original game, while adding in a gorgeous new coat of paint and fun new mechanics. The ghosts can combine to gain new abilities to stop PAC-MAN, you yourself can obtain new power-ups to do things like speed up or generate a clone of yourself to eat dots faster, there are level gimmicks to spice things up like dash pads and springs... this game is jam-packed with fun new things. There's never a dull moment here.

The visuals are also fantastic, featuring richly-detailed, vibrant sprite art that fills your screen with a wide gamut of eye-catching colors, and expressive, lively animations that give the game an extra dose of personality. Pair that with an infectiously catchy and upbeat soundtrack, and you have yourself some damn good PAC-MAN. Arrangement is well and truly an excellent time. If you ever get a chance to play this, don't pass it up.

Incredibly fun sprite work and great music, up there with Championship Edition in terms of the best versions of Pac-Man to play. My only complaint is that by world 3 or 4 things get hectic in a way that I find a lot more difficult to handle than normal Pac-Man. The mechanic of ghosts transforming into more complex, harder enemies is neat, but eventually, there's so much going on on-screen that you can't find time to stop any of them from transforming. Once I was regularly dealing with 4 powered-up ghosts and no power pellets left, I just spammed the credits button to get through the game, and death becoming trivial to me like that isn't very fun, but maybe I just need to get better. Out of all the games on Pac-Man Arcade+, this and Championship Edition are probably the biggest highlights.

But
The game never really ends.

Someone,
Somewhere
Is being chased by monsters!

the real monster is PAC-MAN (YOU!!!)

The Pac-Scape has been relatively quiet after Pac & Pal. In the 13 years since, Namco has taken only two really deep shots at the formula with Pac-Mania and this gem, initially tucked away in an arcade compilation cabinet, hiding among other "arranged" style classic Namco titles. It was released rather unceremoniously and treated as such, not seeing the light of day until Pac-Man Collection for the GBA, again across a long gap of seven years inbetween, not including an inferior, unrelated game sharing the same title (for whatever reason) released for the PSP.

The original Pac-Man Arrangement is odd. First glances can give an immediate sensory overload with the bright colors, loud poppy soundtrack, and overly-animated assets and sprites. Pac-Man and the ghosts and even the pellets move in a syncopated rhythm, almost trance like. It can be a hard screen to really tune into sometimes, vibrant with life and animation but also incredibly distracting on the other side of that same coin. Maybe a little too distracting for a game like Pac-Man.

Introduced in this game is the fifth ghost Kinky (don't laugh). Kinky's role as the fifth ghost is to enhance the other ghosts' abilities by merging with them. In turn they can receive new abilities, such as dashing in a straight line, jumping straight to Pac-Man's position, and creating a body double that moves in mirrored directions that can also harm Pac-Man.

Much like Miru from Pac & Pal, this is another example of an addition to the Pac formula that sounds interesting on paper but doesn't seem to work in practice, and the reason for that is tied to my main problem with the game.

Arrangement actually has an ending and final boss fight, reached after 20 or so stages. These stages vary in theming and actually present interesting gimmicks that positively add to the gameplay. Jump pads create escape points much like warping from the other side in the days of yore, but without proper care and foresight you might end up in even more dangerous territory. Later mazes can become particularly complex, with pseudo-3D staircases and narrow corners that can be planned out thoroughly for daring escapes but can make being chased and the chances of being flanked adrenaline-rushing.

With all the interesting new ideas going for it, we can go back and put the blame on Kinky for detrimenting these concepts. As the game progresses, Kinky appears more and more, and the chaos and pace of the game will suffer. It was fun and refreshing to have to manage and avoid the ghosts' new abilities thanks to their resident power-up, but almost instantly, maybe around 60% of the game's progress, does this begin to get ludicrous. Kinky's appear rate becomes almost instantaneous, and your quest for screen-clearing stretches ever so much longer.

I've seen playthroughs where people just wait in corners for Kinky to run his course, powering up ghosts over and over again until maybe a few seconds of available track can be cleared. Maybe unless you're a professional Pac-Man player that gets their sick kicks by waiting for extended periods of time to exploit the ghost AI to maximize score this can seem like no issue at all, but for someone like me who likes to bitch and moan, why should I have to take Pac-Man at such a slow and careful pace? I feel like most Pac-Man screens can take as short as 30 seconds and maybe at their longest around two minutes, and two minutes seems to be the time that I and other players I've viewed take to clear the last quarter of the game.

Things get incredibly hectic and almost un-manageable, and playing in the modern day on an emulator or Pac-Man Museum+, Arrangement turns into a game of "how far can I get before I just have to spam credits and brute force my way to the end?" So far my answer is Stage 17 but I don't take that as a source of pride. I just don't feel like a lot of my game overs are justified the way I feel they are in even some of the worst of the Pac games.

Arrangement is probably one of, if not the most, difficult Pac-Man game, and I feel it leans heavily moreso on bullshit than carefully articulated difficulty. I find it also incredibly difficult to even dislike it for that reason though. I have to consider hard every time I believe difficulty is preventing me from enjoying a game for what it is and the game clearly wins out here. Not counting whether or not the overanimation is your cup of tea, Arrangement just feels good to play, and probably feels the best out the mainline Pacs. The stage themes and tilesets are beautifully realized, the added gimmicks don't detriment the gameplay (like they do in the PSP Arrangement), and as long as the core gameplay is Funny Man Eats The Dots, I feel like there isn't any true way to ruin that concept, at least not that I've yet to see.

Keep Kink out of Pac-Man.