A 2019-era me rambling review:

More of a “Persona 0” than Shin Megami Tensei If….

What do I mean by this? Well for starters alignments are replaced with a Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy-esc straightforward story and set specifically within a location focusing on multiple characters changing over the course of the plot. SMT if… was interesting because it brought the school premise but Soul Hackers from a writing perspective was the refinement of the formula (boy isn’t it weird how Shadows appear in this one).

The only real difference between this and Persona is that the gameplay here is more fun than you’ll ever get in Persona 1-4 (I have not played 5 at the time of me writing this).

If you play this game with people who are joyful about games and want to just hang out, it feels like a horror movie generator with all the lovely cheesy moments you could ask for and the anxiety adrenaline pumping you need.

If you play this game straightforward and with people who are super straightforward it’s neat but not mind blowing besides the fact that it recontextualizes horror gameplay ideas to be as simple as a game you could make up on a playground in elementary school.

Lethal Company fun

Pac-Mania: a 3D isometric sequel to Pac-Man where the titular Pac-Man can now jump as he progresses through mazes, released
in 1987.

36 Years later:

9pm at some barcade, I'm playing Capcom vs SNK which is situated around the same area as the Pac-Mania cabinet they had there.
This is the kind of barcade where everyone is going to play Mortal Kombat, which is fair but that also meant absolutely no one
was playing the nearby Pac-Mania or Capcom vs SNK cabinets really (besides only occasionally selecting Capcom characters in Capcom vs SNK to play a quick round).
I'm playing my match when this group of college kids start playing Pac-Mania and exclaim "what the hell is this" and "this not my Pac-Man"
and "this is not how Pac-Man works" and I think also a "this is not my beautiful apple". Little did these individuals know
was that I was a certified Pac-Maniac as at the time I learned that I somehow accumulated more hours in Pac-Mania on my Nintendo Switch than I did playing the
entirety of Super Mario Bros Wonder (collecting every Wonder Seed to 100%) which compared to Pac-Mania I tore up like it was a small little orange.

All of these tiny bits boil down into some real questions that have to be asked here that really will determine the quality of this game (at least in my opinion):

Is the 3D a gimmick? Is this a true successor to Pac-Man? Is funny game with chompy buddy and Lego bricks good?

I'm not gonna pretend like I'm the defacto video game opinion person but for me Pac-Mania is a game that is as easy to pick up as a
regular casual playthrough of Pac-Man but with the added flavor of challenging weirdo platforming mind games. The depth the 3D
brings initially is given as a fun flavor on top of regular Pac-Man in the starting stages but as the game progresses and you
run into the ghosts that jump only when you jump, you realize that it's another strategic dimension added to the endurance
run. What helps also is the addition of a powerup that speeds up Pac-Man, very much like the later stages of the first Pac-Man game
Pac-Mania plays around with the speed of Pac-Man and the ghosts openly. If there's truly one thing wrong here it's that,
like many games that would follow, the presentation of the depth is off and I won't pretend like in my dedication to the game
I didn't see or feel it, especially in the later stages. There were times where spacial awareness was very odd but still I was and am hooked
as with the fun of arcade games, you eventually do kind of feel out some of the weird bits of logic as you keep trying.
Now with all that here, is the 3D a gimmick? I truly don't believe so personally as I believe it provides an interesting recontextualization of Pac-Man's core mechanics,
Pac-Mania feels more like it wants to get at the heart of the weirdo sport-esc challenge that would later spark a literal "championship edition".
I find it incredibly interesting also how this game came out after Super Mario Bros., a game inspired by Pac-Land. I feel that this
game's jumping mechanic in turn feels like it was learning from Super Mario Bros. if anything as the idea of platforming is used for Pac-Man
as sidescrolling jumping challenges were for Mario Bros (heck even the maze scrolls around almost like how Mario Bros moved to scrolling in Super Mario Bros).

A big aspect of this game that I think makes it a hard hitting sequel is the ghost eating, this is the most fun I've had eating
all the ghosts after obtaining a Power Pellet (or I think they're called Pac-Dots idk). Much like the first game you can rack up
a points multiplier, but it's actually rather high compared to the first Pac-Man so inherently there's a lot more reward with the risk
of ghosts returning after being eaten but the extra thrill of keeping the streak going if you have extra pellets/dots on the map.

Speaking of the map, wow you can't see all of it now and personally I think this is a great and interesting change. Starting a round of
Pac-Mania results in being in a maze filled with dots, but now that the maze is much larger than the screen can display there's the
added intrigue of charting a path in the maze and remembering where you've been. I find this to be enjoyable especially with the added
aspect of all the ghosts specifically hunting after you when you only have a few dots remaining.

Now for something that truly has been on my mind for awhile, the differences between the English and Japanese versions of this game.
In the US version of Pac-Mania when you boot up the game you are given the choice of an Easy stage, a Medium stage, and a Hard stage.
Pac-Man in the long term is always an endurance run once you get the tricks down, so this to me seemed like a genuine way to appropriately
award maniac players (like myself) who will always pick the hard stage and casual players who don't really intend to beat this game but
just, play it to play a Pac-Man game. Looking deep and doing some research, it's clear that this was very obviously a commercial aspect
of the English release but is rather fascinating given the fact that I cannot think of any Pac-Man game I've played at an arcade that ever
had a difficulty option. In a Eurogamer article I read through while doing this research, I found a belief that really aligned with my
assumptions here: "With arcade games, as the novelist David Mitchell once wrote, you pay to delay the inevitable.
In other words: failure is certain. But an arcade game that is too challenging produces players that feel short-changed and resentful.
A spread of secret difficulty levels enables an arcade operator to calibrate a game's challenge behind the scenes, and, having
monitored the effects on his public, maximise profits" (Simon Parker)[https://www.eurogamer.net/how-video-game-difficulty-became-a-cultural-battleground].
When playing the Japanese version of Pac-Mania there is no real difficulty selection and the speed of the game starts out incredibly slow
but very much ramps up like how a Pac-Man game usually does from my experience. When digging into Pac-Mania in general I also
found that the configuration of the arcade cabinet's settings plays into a lot of variation even for console ports of this game, with
difficulty and other settings in general being a trend at the time of this game's release it makes sense that this new return of Pac-Man
would jump on that option.

Looking at the game itself and the insides of it, I believe Pac-Mania is a genuine fun reinvention of the first game which is probably
why it hooked me so much. With a new dimension and the double appeal of the English version playing towards casual players and hardcore fans
and the Japanese version directly playing into the conventions of original Pac-Man, I can't really say one is entirely better than the
other especially with the extra complicated angle of the differences between markets.

Pac-Mania good