Tag Archives: DDR

Dance Dance Revolution Extreme (JP) — Issue 53

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Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion Extreme (JP)
Kon­a­mi, 2003

Gold­en Age of DDR

I’m not ashamed to say I have a favorite Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion mix. For any­one who knows me, they know it’s the Japan­ese home ver­sion of DDR Extreme. While it’s the mix I played the least in the arcades, by the time it came home and I got a copy of it, it quick­ly grabbed the top spot in my heart.

There is a gold­en age of DDR and Extreme is the pin­na­cle. Hit­ting the sweet spot as the last game of the gold­en age, JP Extreme is a sol­id home port with the nec­es­sary arcade songs and a fan­tas­tic mix of con­sole old and new songs. All the per­ti­nent Extreme songs are on the ros­ter: 1998, A, Across the Night­mare, DDR, Saku­ra, Para­noia Sur­vivor & Sur­vivor Max, The leg­end of Max and V. Unlike the Amer­i­can port of Extreme, it’s as if some­one played the arcade ver­sion and thought an accu­rate port was the right thing to do.

The home ver­sion plays exact­ly like the arcade ver­sion and, if you’re savvy enough, you can find a way to enable Mar­velous tim­ing, arcade tim­ing win­dows and the Boost and Wave mods found in the arcade ver­sion only. Gen­er­al­ly, the Japan­ese ver­sions of DDR are spot on, and this port — even with­out the addi­tions — is still faithful.

The home ver­sion fea­tures all the usu­al fea­tures that you’ve come to expect: Diet Mode, Edit Mode, Les­son Mode and Train­ing Mode. One of the best things about the mix, how­ev­er, comes in the options. If you have save data from Par­ty Col­lec­tion, you can unlock all the songs in Extreme, and if you need to, you can unlock all the songs in DDR Max and Max 2. That saves time and gets you to the meat and pota­toes of what you came here to do: play awe­some DDR songs.

And the ros­ter is awe­some. There is nary a repeat in sight that drags the mix down (ahem, we’re look­ing at you AM-3P and your var­i­ous remix­es). The qual­i­ty of songs is high, and a lot of the Kon­a­mi orig­i­nals added here are wel­come addi­tions and crossovers from Beat­ma­nia IIDX. Of note is Max.(period), which was new as of Extreme JP’s home release. Max.(period) is one of the new Boss Songs and is a great addi­tion. Boss Songs in this mix are indeed all the Boss Songs from the arcade ver­sion, which lends cred­i­bil­i­ty to the mix and its authenticity.

There isn’t much wrong with this mix. The unlock sys­tem, if you don’t have sup­port data from Par­ty Col­lec­tion, is kind of aggra­vat­ing but it’s not so ter­ri­ble that the mix isn’t worth your time. It’s time con­sum­ing but it only means play­ing more DDR.

If you’re going to play a home ver­sion and don’t have Step­ma­nia, take the time to import DDR Extreme JP. Extreme JP is the clos­est port of Extreme to the arcade short of Step­ma­nia and well worth the mon­ey to track down a copy, a PlaySta­tion 2 and swap discs.

A great ros­ter, sol­id mechan­ics and peak DDR in its gold­en age form makes it a must-buy if you’re at all into dance games and Bemani. DDR Extreme JP was a good final step in the series.

DDR Extreme JP ver­sus DDR Extreme NA

The DDR Extreme ver­sions released in Japan and Amer­i­ca are wild­ly dif­fer­ent. DDR Extreme JP is the clos­est port of the arcade ver­sion that you’re going to get unless you have Step­ma­nia and fine tune your instal­la­tion to match that arcade version. 
The Amer­i­can ver­sion, released in 2004, is not an accu­rate port. It fea­tures dif­fer­ent graph­ics that replace the well-known song wheel and Groove Radar fea­tured in DDR Max and Max 2 and a song ros­ter that did not resem­ble the arcade ver­sion with a lot of licensed songs and few Kon­a­mi orig­i­nals and Bemani crossovers that were intro­duced in the arcade ver­sion. Also, the com­bo and grad­ing sys­tems are dif­fer­ent: A com­bo break auto­mat­i­cal­ly results in a max A grade, Extra Stage requires clear­ing an 8‑footer on Heavy instead of AA grade on any song’s Heavy dif­fi­cul­ty, and Encore Extra Stage/One More Extra Stage was removed. 

To cor­rect the mis­steps of Extreme NA, Extreme 2 was released in 2005 for the PlaySta­tion 2 with a slight­ly more accu­rate song ros­ter to match the arcade ver­sion of Extreme.

Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2 — 4Q2020 issue

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DDR Extreme bet­ter sec­ond time around

I’m a DanceDanceRev­o­lu­tion fan from way back when, in that time and space before the U.S. real­ly dis­cov­ered the series and when we dealt with hasti­ly put-togeth­er mix­es that didn’t real­ly cap­ture the feel of DDR. Ah, those were the heady days of 2002. Alas, DDR final­ly blew up in the U.S., and we final­ly start­ed receiv­ing mix­es much like Japan. The prob­lem was, we were get­ting them years after the fact, and when we did get them, they were most­ly lack­ing — bro­ken, incom­plete mess­es that you were bet­ter off pre­tend­ing didn’t exist. That, my friends, is where we join our sto­ry already in progress with Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion Extreme 2.

Nev­er mind that there is no DDR Extreme 2 in Japan. We’re going to set that aside for a minute to focus on the fact of why it exists in the U.S. DDR Extreme 2 is borne of the fail­ure of Kon­a­mi to do right by its fans out­side of Japan. We received DDR Extreme in 2004, a full two years after the orig­i­nal was released in arcades and for PlaySta­tion 2 in Japan. That game is absolute garbage: It’s noth­ing like what Japan received, which is a game that’s much clos­er to the arcade ver­sion of Extreme. We received a bro­ken and changed-for-the-worse song inter­face, miss­ing and weird songlist and grad­ing mechan­ics that were excised as of DDR 5th Mix. Now that you’re all caught up, you should see the rea­son why we need­ed a do-over game of sorts. That’s where Extreme 2 comes in.

Extreme 2 is a decent addi­tion to the U.S. con­sole DDR library of games. It fea­tures the song wheel inter­face and restores the 5th Mix grad­ing mechan­ics. The song list is great, too, final­ly fea­tur­ing at least some of the songs found in the Japan­ese ver­sion such as Car­toon Heroes (Speedy Mix), Irre­sistible­ment, Speed Over Beethoven and Para­noia Survivor/Survivor Max, which were all new to Japan­ese Extreme when it was released. It close­ly mir­rors the home release of Japan­ese Extreme, which meant Kon­a­mi was final­ly tak­ing the U.S. mar­ket seriously.

Because it’s so close to the Japan­ese ver­sion of Extreme (editor’s note: We reviewed this title in the 2Q2013 issue), we’re going to skip the focus on how it plays oth­er than to tell you that the tim­ing win­dows remain loose as they always are in the U.S. ver­sions, if you care about that sort of thing. From expe­ri­ence, it’s much eas­i­er for me to get an A grade on Para­noia Sur­vivor in the Amer­i­can ver­sion than in the Japan­ese ver­sion. The Amer­i­can ver­sions always have had more loose tim­ing win­dows, and it makes play­ing a lot eas­i­er. The options are pret­ty much the same, though you will have to spend time unlock­ing songs because, as with pre­vi­ous U.S. releas­es, it’s miss­ing the Sys­tem Data Sup­port fea­ture found in the Japan­ese ver­sions. That fea­ture unlocks a pre­vi­ous game’s data using the cur­rent game. While this would have been help­ful in Extreme 2, it’s not so bad to have to play through the Event mode or Dance Mas­ter mode, though you will be tired of cer­tain songs after the fifth time through.

And Dance Mas­ter mode is where you may spend a decent amount of time try­ing to unlock cer­tain things. Dance Mas­ter is not a ter­ri­ble mode but some of the con­di­tions are not easy and require an inti­mate knowl­edge of DDR. If you’ve bought this ver­sion, chances are you are expe­ri­enced enough with DDR for this not to be a prob­lem, but for the unex­pe­ri­enced this might be a tedious exer­cise in, well, exercise.

And, because many of the servers are now down, we can’t real­ly com­ment on the online modes. While active they were inter­est­ing and fun to play against oth­ers using the ear­ly pre­cur­sor to PlaySta­tion Net­work, but alas, 15 years lat­er there are no servers for Extreme 2, so that’s a loss. You aren’t real­ly miss­ing any­thing there because there is always the lat­est ver­sion of DDR and Step­ma­nia, which are imme­di­ate­ly supe­ri­or to a 15-year-old game.

DDR Extreme 2, an anom­aly itself, is an OK addi­tion to the U.S. library. Though I fault Kon­a­mi and its U.S. branch heav­i­ly for screw­ing up DDR Extreme enough to have to do a sec­ond go-round, the well-round­ed redone songlist kind of makes up for the extreme­ly bor­ing mess that pre­ced­ed Extreme 2.

DDR Max Dance Dance Revolution 6th Mix — 2Q2015 issue

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A new era of DDR

Let’s have a quick his­to­ry review, shall we? Kon­a­mi cre­at­ed the Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion series in 1998 and by 2002, there were at least six entries in the main series. I’d gath­er that this meant DDR was pret­ty pop­u­lar, but you would nev­er hear Kon­a­mi say that too loud. At some point, how­ev­er, some­one real­ized the mag­ic that was DDR need­ed to come into the mod­ern era. So, every­thing that was relat­ed to the first five entries in the series — with the excep­tion of the song wheel and dif­fi­cul­ty cat­e­gories — was thrown out in favor of a com­plete over­haul. DDR Max was the result and with it comes a mixed bag of mod­ern and old DDR.

Graph­i­cal­ly, Max rep­re­sents the begin­ning of a new era. Sure, it resem­bles cur­rent DDR games because they use the song wheel, but the col­ors became a lit­tle brighter and the lit­tle touch­es used to illus­trate the dif­fer­ent dif­fi­cul­ties and cat­e­gories are empha­sized more. The inter­face is much eas­i­er to read, though the addi­tion of the Groove Radar still has some ways to go here. It’s not exact­ly help­ful in pro­vid­ing digestible infor­ma­tion that helps make quick informed deci­sions. That’s a com­plaint that still stands today, so much so that I tend to ignore the meter alto­geth­er. Also, the foot rat­ing is miss­ing and song dif­fi­cul­ty rat­ing num­bers have yet to come (that’s not until Max 2). But the song wheel has been fresh­ened up so it looks a lot bet­ter and is a lit­tle more palatable.

Musi­cal­ly, the selec­tion is among the best in the series. The one thing about Max that’s notable about the music is the lack of a Para­noia mix. For a series trade­mark song, its absence is imme­di­ate­ly notice­able, and quite frankly, drags the mix down a few notch­es. There’s a few throw away songs like Share My Love and Dive, but over­all it’s quite a few excel­lent choic­es thrown togeth­er to make a good song list. The vari­ety is nice and it feels like a good fresh start for a series that had a lot of repeats in the first five games.

I don’t go back and play 6th Mix often, most­ly because I can’t deal with a lack of Para­noia in my life at this point. As a DDR old head and one who owns the Amer­i­can ver­sion as well as the Japan­ese ver­sion, I applaud the change up that Kon­a­mi pur­sued. It was a bold move that paid off in the long run: DDR still looks like a lot like this form, even with at least eight more games under its belt as a series. Some­times, a change in pace is need­ed to keep the dance groove going.

DanceDance Rev­o­lu­tion trivia

* DDR Max is the first game to fea­ture a 10-foot dif­fi­cul­ty song. Max 300 was offi­cial­ly the first 10-foot­er in the his­to­ry of the series, though it would­n’t receive its offi­cial rat­ing until Max 2 was released.

* Max 300, the boss song of the mix, fea­tures 573 steps in its Heavy dif­fi­cul­ty chart. 573 is known as the Kon­a­mi num­ber, a num­ber that relates to the roman­ized pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the com­pa­ny’s name.

* Max is the first DDR game to fea­ture the Light/Standard/Heavy dif­fi­cul­ty scheme, dance point sys­tem, speed mods, Extra Stage/One More Extra Stage and freeze arrows. The dif­fi­cul­ty scheme would stay in place until the release of DDR Super­NO­VA in 2006.

* Two songs intro­duced in the mix, Flash in the Night and Fol­low Me, are the only two songs in the series that do not have an offi­cial foot rat­ing. These two songs were intro­duced in 6th Mix, which is the only mix that does not use the foot rat­ing sys­tem. They have nev­er appeared in lat­er mix­es, which gave offi­cial Kon­a­mi num­bered rat­ings to all songs.

DDR Max 2 — 2Q2014 issue

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Choos­ing a sev­enth dance card

There comes a time in every long-run­ning gam­ing fran­chise when said fran­chise has to grow up. That tran­si­tion may come in the form of a new coat of paint or through a purg­ing of char­ac­ters, a reboot, if you will. But every fran­chise goes through it, and Bemani and Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion, in par­tic­u­lar, are no strangers to this. By the point of Max 2, the sev­enth main mix in the series, DDR had to do some­thing at the risk of grow­ing stale. So, con­tin­u­ing the trends start­ed in Max it was.

Max 2 presents itself as an inter­est­ing beast, even if you’re inti­mate­ly famil­iar with the series. There’s a new mode to play, Oni — which intro­duces the con­cept of a “three strikes and you’re out pol­i­cy” with cours­es to play — and the over­all look and feel has been upgrad­ed from the days of yore. Max 2 rep­re­sent­ed the mid­dle of a new era for DDR, begun with the whole­sale do-over of Max. There’s not much new in the way of con­cepts for Max 2, and that’s all fine and well. Since Max’s changes were regard­ed as a fail­ure and an unnec­es­sary slash-and-burn of the fran­chise, Max 2 works toward undo­ing the mess made previously.

The game does well with updat­ed aes­thet­ics. The song wheel (intro­duced in 5th Mix), the foot rat­ing (dropped in Max), Groove Radar (intro­duced in Max in favor of the foot rat­ing) and Freeze arrows return. The re-intro­duc­tion of the foot rat­ing sys­tem is the best idea that could have come from clean­ing up Max’s mess. The Groove Radar and foot rat­ing sys­tem give you all of the per­ti­nent song dif­fi­cul­ty infor­ma­tion that you will ever need. The song wheel looks bet­ter than ever since it’s now in its third iter­a­tion and Freeze arrows don’t seem to be such an aber­ra­tion as they once were in Max.

The song list is inter­est­ing mix of updates to old favorites as well as new entries aimed at adding some­thing new to DDR. Not that Max did­n’t do that very well, but Max 2 is about a greater vari­ety of songs and it shows in the fact that there’s not a new Para­noia in sight — at least in the arcade ver­sion. The home ver­sion attempts to inject a new iter­a­tion of the famil­iar song, but it’s not near­ly as suc­cess­ful as it thinks it is. Yes, Para­noia Sur­vivor, one of the boss songs of the sequel Extreme, is present and avail­able for play in the Japan­ese con­sole ver­sion, but its inclu­sion as a pre­view song isn’t real­ly nec­es­sary. And it does­n’t make a whole lot of sense. Why destroy the myth of Sur­vivor — the first 10-foot­er Para­noia — by show­ing its hand ear­ly? My prob­lem with Max 2 is illus­trat­ed by this point: The game some­times feels like a re-tread of pre­vi­ous entries, and it should­n’t. I was under the impres­sion that the rea­son for the deba­cle cre­at­ed by blow­ing up DDR with Max was to avoid just the sort of prob­lems that you’re going to run into with Max 2. Though, in its favor, Max 2 has Maxx Unlim­it­ed, which is my favorite Maxx song out of the entire bunch.

I have to com­mend Kon­a­mi for at least try­ing to right the wrongs com­mit­ted with Max’s well- mean­ing phi­los­o­phy of start­ing over. It just feels a tri­fle like Max 2 is slack­ing into old habits. Max 2 may not feel like it’s cheat­ing on its diet start­ed by Max’s slim­down but by hav­ing a few extra songs, Max 2 isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly push­ing the plate back like it should and it shows.

DDR 5th Mix — 2Q2014 issue

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The last of an era for DDR

The end of an era had to come for Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion at some point, and that final­i­ty hit like a ton of bricks with 5th Mix. There real­ly was­n’t much of a going-away par­ty or cel­e­bra­tion of all that was DDR before the storm­ing of the gates that was Max, but 5th Mix rep­re­sent­ed the cul­mi­na­tion of the phi­los­o­phy that was danc­ing with arrows before speed mods and Freeze arrows came along and changed everything.

5th Mix isn’t bad, if you’re used to play­ing DDR. At this point, every­thing is in place and you should know how things work: You step on four dif­fer­ent arrows in time with songs in three dif­fi­cul­ties: Basic, Trick and Mani­ac. You miss enough times, it’s game over. If you should pass the song, you’re grad­ed on how well you did. 5th Mix does­n’t intro­duce any­thing new mechan­ics-wise, and that’s fine con­sid­er­ing it’s con­tent with let­ting you play DDR exact­ly the way you’ve played before. Instead, it makes changes in the aes­thet­ics, and that’s where change is need­ed the most.

5th Mix changed the way the DDR struc­ture looked with the great intro­duc­tion of the song wheel. Gone was the old look of CDs in a juke­box and in came a cir­cu­lar sec­tioned wheel — sim­i­lar to the one found on the “Price is Right” — that fea­tures all of the songs avail­able for play. This over­haul brings with it a bet­ter look and a bet­ter feel over­all to the game, and it does­n’t hurt that it’s the first in the series to run at 60 frames per sec­ond. Also, 5th Mix was the first in the series to intro­duce a unique col­or scheme that “rep­re­sent­ed” the mix. This brings a fresh look to the table and works won­ders with mak­ing a seem­ing­ly tired con­cept look new.

The music is anoth­er help in the revival. A few old­er favorites returned, but there’s quite a few new tunes and they stand out. One of my favorites, Heal­ing Vision ~Angel­ic Mix~, steals the show and makes its pres­ence known as a boss song as does Can’t Stop Fallin’ in Love Speed Mix and Afrono­va Primeval. The rest of the songlist is kind of take it or leave it, but there’s a good mix, which is essen­tial to any DDR mix’s long-term replay value.

Where I find a few prob­lems with 5th Mix is also with­in the song list. Thank­ful­ly, 5th Mix is the only ver­sion that fea­tures the ridicu­lous long ver­sions of a few songs. Prob­a­bly the most egre­gious of these unnec­es­sary uses of space is the over­ly long ver­sion of Dyna­mite Rave. Besides not need­ing yet anoth­er ver­sion of the elder­ly song, the long ver­sion is LONG, much too long and it bor­ders on obnox­ious. There is absolute­ly no need for a three-minute ver­sion of any already corny song that appears much too fre­quent­ly in DDR songlists in the ear­ly days. And much like Dyna­mite Rave, the oth­er long ver­sions don’t real­ly add much to the setlist. If I want to hear a ver­sion of Brit­ney Spears’ Oops I Did it Again, I’d just lis­ten to the orig­i­nal. And B4U ~Glo­ri­ous style~ is a com­plete waste of space that could have been occu­pied with oth­er wor­thy songs that did­n’t make the cut, like Rhythm and Police.

5th Mix was a good last call to an era of DDR that most play­ers did­n’t know was com­ing to an end. A pass­able song list, great upgrade over pre­vi­ous ver­sions and a stream­lined approach to the cur­rent DDR struc­ture meant a decent ver­sion to dance to with few prob­lems. It’s not the great­est DDR mix, but we can prob­a­bly safe­ly say at least it was­n’t Max. 5th Mix found its home right in the mid­dle of the series, where it was sup­posed to be all along.