YMMV / Pac-Man World 2

• Awesome Music: The game shares a page with the rest of the trilogy here.
• Camera Screw: The camera will often refuse to turn at certain moments, even when it obstructs the next platform you need to get on.
• Goddamned Bats: Rev Roll Rams. They're intimidating at first when you realize they're immune to your butt-bounce, and no matter where you are they're usually positioned to knock you right into a bottomless pit. Once you know how to kill them — stun them with a rev-roll of your own, then butt-bounce them — you still have to put up with Pac Man's three-second-long "stunned" animation, during which you're completely defenceless.
  • One final gripe that makes them extra intimidating/annoying: they love to hide in crates.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you pause the game repeatedly in the middle of a rev roll, you begin to get this odd levitation that can be very useful. In particular, it's useful for exploiting another glitch in Volcanic Panic — if you first pull this off and then rev roll just when you sink all the way in, you fall through and can skip the entire level. It's hard to pull off, but if you can do it, it makes the time trial a joke. This speed run pulls it off.
• Nightmare Fuel: Pinky's entire demeanor plays her out to be an unhinged Yandere. How so? In the opening cutscene, Pinky stands outside of Pac-Man's window and picks petals off a flower while she watches him sleep, and only flees when Pac-Man's dog, Chomp Chomp, starts barking at her. During her boss fight, she makes "If I Can't Have You…" declarations. Even her boss theme becomes unhinged after a few discordant notes, and only gets more psychotic and discordant as the song goes on.
• Porting Disaster: This game's Game Boy Advance version suffers from a lot of the same issues as that of its predecessor. Although the graphics and animations are nice and the music is replicated faithfully, an excessive amount of content ended up being cut; including the FMV cutscenes (replaced by static images and text), arcade games, the unique gimmicks such as the ice/roller skates and submarine, Blinky's boss battle (as well as the Megawhale's), and a significant number of levels including the entire Ocean world and all but one of the Forest world's levels. Although they do keep some of the Galaxian Mazes, most of the levels that remain^note 16 levels (including the separate ones for boss battles), 9 less than the 25 levels (plus bosses) of the console versions. are excessively long and packed with Fake Difficulty from the clunky 2.5D perspective and controls, and it has the annoying habit of playing the wrong songs^note Most notoriously, using Scuba Duba's theme for Pac-Village and The Bear Basics — which doesn't fit at all — despite also having the correct theme for those levels in the game. for the wrong levels. It's playable, sure, but just like before, it's barebones to the point that you're left feeling that Namco cut too much out of the game out to fit it onto a small cartridge.
• That One Boss: The battle "Clyde in the Caldera" against Blinky^note Referred to as Clyde due to a translation error. Ask anyone who has played this game what the hardest boss is, they'll choose Blinky without a doubt. He Lampshades it by claiming he doesn't think even Spooky can take on Pac-Man. He is basically Inky and Pinky on steroids; with faster-firing and wider-ranged barrages of fireballs, and even smaller platforms with all the bridges taken away. Coupled with the utterly despair-filled boss theme, you'll soon realize you're well on the back foot before the fight even starts.
  • In addition, rev-rolling was the attack you used to defeat Pinky, but Blinky's mech is invulnerable to it. Instead, you have to butt-bounce his cockpit when he temporarily flies down below ground level and stops shooting. The issue is that the hitbox for said cockpit gets smaller with every hit; when he's down to four hits left, you'll more-or-less resort to butt-bouncing over and over, just begging to find the sweet spot. Combine this with his insanely high HP for this game's standards, punishing attacks and having to Rev-Roll between small, widely spaced-out platforms to get to him when he's vulnerable — which is very likely to send you to boiling magma-flavored doom while you're scrambling to avoid him — and you have a boss that's absolutely the hardest one in the game.
• That One Level: A lot of levels compete for this title, namely Avalanche Alley, Blade Mountain, Volcanic Panic, Magma Opus, Haunted Boardwalk, and Night Crawling. But the king is Ice River Run, combining more Scrappy Mechanics than any other single level — ice physics, giant bears, Rev Roll Rams, picking up power pellets before you can actually see the ghosts — with none of the fun gimmicks like the ice/roller skates or the submarine.
  • You could make almost any level That One Level if you're talking 100% completion and Time Trial.
    • And Ice River Run makes both of those sidequests even worse. The positioning of the Pac-Dot arcs in mid-air was very clearly not play-tested.
    • The Game Boy Advance version takes this up to eleven, with each stage being an unbearable Marathon Level; the latter half of the game is filled with cheap ways to die, too.
  • Haunted Boardwalk is, without a doubt, one of the most brutal levels to 100%. The first three parts (the beginning, the first set of sinking boards, and the second "stable" line) aren't too bad, but when you hit the last section, get ready to throw your controller at your screen five hundred times over. For starters, there's several crates they stick which can often lead to your death just because of what direction the board decides to sink in, turning it into a halfway Luck-Based Mission. Then there's the fact that the path splits into two twice, one of which where the "right" path (with a Pac-Dot chain) is way off in the distance and easy to miss, and at the very end no less! Oh, and the worst part? Somebody on the dev team decided to put Pac-Dot arcs in the last section... no fewer than THREE! If you miss even one of the dots in the arc, you have to kill yourself and start over, and it's going to happen a lot. In past levels with arcs you could at least go back and get any that you missed, but because of the sinking boards, there is no way to do this. Oh, and if you have the early version of the game where the ghosts kill you in one hit? Good. Luck. The level is littered with ghosts in some very mean places, and they even finish with three of them coming straight at you. Thankfully the later version (Greatest Hits, Platinum Hits, and Player's Choice across the consoles) nerfed them to only slice one hit point.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Helivators, as detailed on the main page (see Demoted to Extra).
  • In the main console versions, Swimming only shows up exactly one time after the game first teaches it to you in The Bear Basics, which is two levels after in Pac-Dot Pond. From there onward — besides the decidedly different on-rails swimming with the flippers in Scuba Duba and Shark Attack — it never makes another appearance. This also means the Steel Ball's ability to let you walk under the water also suffers this fate.
  • Pac-Man's flip kick is only required for beating the game during Blade Mountain (where it is your only method of attack and is needed for clearing a few gaps that have suspended crates in the way) and the final boss.

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