Tag Archives: Konami

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.