[darkamdusias]

Life is hard for a broke college student. Responsibilities and dirty laundry are plentiful. Money, however, isn’t. As a result of this unfortunate predicament, I rarely have chances to buy something new and shiny for myself. Once in a blue moon though, I'm magically able to conjure up enough money for something I really, really, want (or, more often than not, just live off Ramen for about six straight weeks). This year, “Dance Dance Revolution Extreme”, the newest American release of my favorite rhythm game series would be my “something new and shiny”. I expected the world from this game, and hoped against hope that it wouldn’t be awful, as this was probably going to be the only game I’d be seeing until Christmas. So, in the somewhat likely event that you still care, you’re probably wondering if this game was really worth it all. Well, at this point you can do one of two things to find out:

1. Scroll to the bottom of my review and check out my rating there.
2. Grab some popcorn, get comfy, and read on, because this is going to take a while.

The first thing I noticed upon booting up the game was the absence of the arcade version’s sickly-looking green interface. Don’t let my description of it fool you: I loved the arcade version’s interface to death, as DDR Extreme was the game that not only got me into DDR, but introduced me to a vast majority of my current friends. Reasoning that it was pointless to cry over spilt milk I moved on.

Things however, only continued to get worse, even on the smallest level. For instance mode select screen where one selected Singles, Versus, or Doubles play had been altered as well. Instead of series staples like Robo and Emi, I was instead treated to translucent green Casper rejects. I did however, grudgingly move once I’d reassured myself that these changes were all merely aesthetic, and didn’t affect the incredible gameplay that I knew and loved.

I felt my heart sink when I saw that Konami had messed with the song wheel as well. Instead of using the simple, fluid, interface from the series’ last few Playstation 2 outings, Konami had apparently decided that players wanted the song wheel that the series had used in its infancy. I instantly disliked this revived song wheel for two chief reasons.

First, it took away my ability to view scores from multiple songs at once. With this new setup in place, I had to physically scroll over to a song to see how I’d done on it. Granted, this seems minor, but over time, it began to get more and more annoying. My other nitpick with the song wheel was that it was counter-intuitive. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I had to hit the left arrow to proceed right, and vice-versa.

My gripes with the song selection screen didn’t end there. The “foot-rating” system had been done away with as well. It was now replaced with a shoddy looking “bar-rating”. Most of the songs in the game had three bars, each connoting one of the three difficulty ratings. The bars themselves were divided into ten equal sections. The system was self-explanatory, really. If a song’s difficulty bar had four of the sections shaded in, the difficulty of a song was, well, four. If all ten are shaded in, well, you get the idea. While the bar system is aesthetically inferior to the foot-rating system, it does manage to work, albeit in a somewhat flawed manner. A perfect example of its flawed functionally is most evident on the Standard difficulty. If the song had a rating that ranged from five to eight, the sections the bar tended to bleed together, making picking out the song’s difficulty harder than it really should be.

If you happen to be sitting there in slack-jawed horror, wondering how this could get any worse, I’ve got one last surprise for you: the groove radar is gone. Don’t ask, because I don’t have an answer. I’m going to stop describing the interface here, because my brain is starting to hurt. That said though, I shan’t deduct more than a point or two from the game’s final score for this offensive visual mess, as it has only the most minuscule of bearings on the game once you actually select a song and start playing.

Changes, as far as the core-gameplay is concerned are almost nonexistent. The game’s premise is the same as it was in 1998 – “Step on arrows to the beat of cheesy music”. It should be noted however, that jump-combos (combinations of two arrows at once) now only add one point to a song’s combo count. It’s a minor change, but I must say that I liked the old way better, as I felt that I’d accomplished more at the end of a song. Ah, well. Life goes on, I suppose.

Now that I’ve gotten the minor changes out of the way, two fairly sizable changes have been made to HOW the game is played. First, the “One More Extra Stage” is gone. Granted, this isn’t something that affects me personally, as I doubt I’ll ever be good enough to earn it, but series veterans will most probably miss the opportunity to add one more song to their set after AA’ing the game’s challenging Extra Stage.

While I’m on the topic of the AA rating, I’ve got a grim warning to players with big feet: Get used to seeing a lot fewer to these. With Konami’s decision to remove the option to alter Dance Play Settings, the Triangle, Square, Circle, and X buttons remain activated as a player plays the song, whether s/he wants them there or not. Players that aren’t used to consistently hitting the center of an arrow will find themselves getting far more “MISS” and “BOO” ratings than they might otherwise be used to. This is further complicated by the fact that Konami has changed the requirements to attain the esteemed rank of “AA”. DDRMAX and DDRMAX2’s lenient “full combo = AA” system has gone the way of the dodo. Players are now required to play at least 93% of a song with Perfect accuracy AND full-combo it if they want to earn the grade in question. With these new changes in effect, the AA rating is now more elusive than it has ever been.

On a lighter note, we have minigames! While most of the series’ long-time fans will probably ignore the DDR Extreme’s minigames, I figured that I should mention them briefly for the sake of completeness. The game’s minigames come in two varieties: games that can either be played with an EyeToy, and games that can’t. None of the minigames that the game offers is particularly compelling by any stretch of the imagination, but they do, however, serve as an occasionally nice break from the game’s incredibly disappointing songlist.

…Ah, the songlist. Here we are at long last. While I applaud Konami for trying to take the series’ music in a new direction for this game, there is wisdom in the old saying that “you shouldn’t mess with a good thing”. The arcade version of DDR Extreme has, what is in my opinion, the best songlist that the series has seen in its five-year old arcade history. It boasted an incredible amount of variety and had a titanic songlist, so that all but the most hardened of music critics would be able to find at least something that they liked. The Japanese port of the game similarly had the distinctive honor of being the best Playstation 2 DDR game to date for the very same reasons. The American version of the game on the other hand, had me wondering how Konami could have just screwed everything up so badly.

Dance Dance Revolution Extreme’s songlist is rife with all sorts of (for lack of a better term) garbage, ranging from horrendous Karaoke Revolution covers and the worst music that came out of the 80’s to an astounding number of repeats from earlier US PS2 mixes and Konami Originals that a majority of the series’ fanbase couldn’t care less about. To add insult to injury, Konami picked only a measly eleven songs (seemingly at random) that were unique to the game whose likeness it claims.

Thanks in large part to these glaring flaws, I found myself getting tired of this game very, very, quickly. Now don’t get me wrong: I did like a small handful of the Konami originals that made it in, and I also welcomed a few of the revivals from the 32-bit era. Heck, there were even a couple of good songs amidst the terrible licenses, and to top it all off, North America’s shiny new Konami Original (MAXIMIZER) sounded great, and was a blast to play. It’s just that in the end, even all these redeeming qualities weren’t enough to salvage the game’s terminally flawed songlist.

I didn’t necessarily have a problem with the direction that Konami decided to take with the songlist. On paper, it was a good idea – Get a bunch of licenses that the American audience will recognize, add a few licenses from older games in the series, and throw in a combination of both old and new Konami Originals to create the most unique mix that has yet been seen on American shores. The formula was successful, to some extent. The mix is definitely unique. It’s got a flavor that’s completely different than any American mix before it. However, the poor decisions when it came to the creation of the songlist is what ultimately damned the game in the eyes of the series’ most fervent fans.

Just when it had started to look like all was lost for the game though, Konami latest introduction to the series was so fantastic that it managed to offset at flawed songlist to a rather large degree. This game’s saving grace came in the form of Mission Mode, a fresh and challenging way to enjoy the series. This new mode is a collection of a hundred varied challenges that require the player to do everything from playing with a challenging combination of modifiers to simply just finishing a song without missing a step. The missions start out almost laughably easy, but as players get farther and farther into the mode, the difficulty ramps up steeply and becomes incredibly challenging to even the best players out there. More experienced players will spend the lion's share of their time in this mammoth and will slowly but surely notice that their arrow-stomping skills will be all the better for it.

After all is said and done, Dance Dance Revolution Extreme is an interesting, if conflicted entry into the American series of DDR games. While the game’s lacking songlist prohibits me from recommending this game in good conscience, longtime fans might want to check it out anyway, if only for Mission Mode and the returning Oni Mode (now dubbed “Challenge Mode”). Rent before you buy, folks.

Final Rating: 6/10