YMMV / Pac-Man Championship Edition

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Championship Edition DX forces the game into Adrenaline Time if you get too close to a non-weakened and non-sleep ghost. Unfortunately the timer continues to tick down in real life, meaning that this "assistance" can be detrimental to one's score or time, and top-level players end up having to strategize around avoiding forced slowdowns. Thankfully, Championship Edition 2 does away with this.
• Catharsis Factor: The ability to consume a line of dozens of ghosts in Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, in addition to shattering your perception of the series in general, is also ridiculously awesome to watch. Championship Edition 2 amps it up with a brief Art Shift cutscene of Pac-Man eating a line of voxel ghosts when you eat the last ghost train currently on the playfield.
• Contested Sequel: Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 to Championship Edition DX. While the game is zanier and more intense in areas, it also changes up some mechanics that detract fans of CEDX, which has been a rather Tough Act to Follow.
• Even Better Sequel: While Pac-Man: Championship Edition was already received positively, Pac Man: Championship Edition DX is considered an overall improvement. For all its worth, it managed to get above 90 on Metacritic.
• First Installment Wins: There are several fans who prefer the first Championship Edition over DX and 2, due to the former being closer to the original arcade game's design and mechanics, while still feeling "modern", over the latter two, which brings its own unique twists to the formula and deviates from it in numerous ways. It has also received the most rereleases amongst the three as well.
• Memetic Mutation: Ghost Dance. ^Explanation "Pac Baby" from Championship Edition 2 became infamous for being paired to an animation by Rule 34 artist minus8 featuring genderbent (except for Pinky), Moe Anthropomorphic versions of Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde dancing. The dance and the song would end up spreading to other fandoms, as well, including the Dream SMP.
• Nintendo Hard: Championship Edition 2 is perhaps one of the hardest games that use modernized gameplay mechanics, thanks to high movement speeds without any way to mitigate them and weakened ghost trains actively trying to avoid you, and you can only eat a train by eating the head of it (if you run into the side, you'll just bounce off). Plus, in harder difficulties, the Power Pellet and the fruit also try to avoid you too!
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound of scoring a power pellet in DX and 2 and blowing straight through a super-long chain of ghosts.
• Porting Disaster: The mobile version of DX is missing much of the content from the console and PC versions, and doesn't come with DLC.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • For those who play for overall leaderboards, Championship Edition and Championship Edition DX have 10-minute modes that do contribute to your overall ranking and can drag on compared to the score and time trial modes. CEDX also has a mode where you have to build the longest ghost-consumption chain possible, which requires an entirely different strategy from the other two modes and is also ranked. Both of these mechanics were dropped completely in Championship Edition 2, where the only ranked modes are 5 minutes each (there is a 10-minute mode but it's unranked and solely for practice).
  • Championship Edition 2 forces a tutorial on you when you first start the game, which you must complete the first 11 sets of rules in order to unlock Score Attack, and you need a minimum of 500,000 in Dungeon Regular within that to unlock Adventure. Championship Edition 2 Plus did away with this.
• Sequel Displacement: Championship Edition DX (2010) is among the most popular in this line of games, even going as far as making some think that it's the first one. The original Championship Edition actually released 3 years prior for Xbox 360, designed by Tōru Iwatani himself.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: After the comparatively easy Championship Edition DX, Championship Edition 2 brings the difficulty back up. The slowdown mechanic has been removed, bombs no longer force ghosts back into their spawn box (instead, they just bring Pac-Man back to his spawn point), ghost trains will continue to move at their usual speed while a power pill is in effect, and eating a ghost train requires eating its leader first or else Pac-Man will just bounce off. On top of that, the whole game, especially on Extreme difficulty, is a lot faster than even DX at speed 50. It also introduces the mechanic of fruit items (needed to progress through the level) and power pellets running away from the player at higher difficulty levels.
• That One Achievement: "Adventure 4" in Championship Edition 2. On the surface, you just need to beat Area 6-15 in Adventure Mode. But just getting to that requires beating every single prior non-boss area on Pro difficulty and every boss without dying and all 1-ups obtained. No wonder it currently has the lowest "players who have this achievement" percentage of any achievement in the game's Steam version at a little over 1%.
• That One Level: Area 6-4 in Championship Edition 2 — Hexagon Score Attack. Hexagon is known for being ridiculously difficult as a course, but the Pro difficulty clamps the time down to 6 minutes at most for completion, making this incredibly challenging to complete. Odds are, this is one of the areas most have problems with in completing Adventure Mode because of 6-4's tight requirements.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The series is sometimes dismissed by purists due to shifting from the traditional Endless Game formula to "score as many points as you can in 5 or 10 minutes", the addition of new mechanics such as Smart Bombs and brakes, and heavily scripted ghosts movement to the point that making ghost trains are one of the integral parts of the gameplay.

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