Headlines

Well, another autumn is upon us, and if you're a Dance Dance Revolution player, you know that besides the changing leaves and cooling weather, one can also expect a new Dance Dance Revolution game to come with the changing of the season. And Konami didn't stray from their usual practice, releasing both DDR X2 for the Playstation 2 and DDR Hottest Party 3 for the Wii on October 27th. This review will be focusing on the Playstation 2 incarnation.

The release of X2 is a little unusual from the past few years' releases for a few reasons. First, it has no known arcade counterpart as of yet, which most of the PS2 releases have had (the exceptions being Extreme 2 and Disney Channel Edition). Although there has been low mumblings from Naoki Maeda in interviews about a future Arcade DDR game, it has yet to be even announced, and it's not even known whether it will be an incarnation of X2 or not. The second reason is that it's one of the first DDR releases since famed DDR composer Naoki Maeda has become producer of the entire DDR series.

But let's get right down to the thick of it, shall we? The first thing you'll notice when you pop in any DDR game is the interface, and obviously X2 isn't an exception to that rule. Being a followup to last year's DDR X, it's not surprisingly that the game is based on X's interface. However, it looks much smoother and cleaner than X's theme did. The background animation for the songwheel has changed from a rather dull background of clouds to a refreshing "city" background, complete with animated cars and buses on the streets. The background even changes from night to day and from day to night, which looks really cool. The banners, character artwork, and the other new quirks look great too. It is such a shame then, that most of the gameplay interface directly mimics that of DDR X. The handful of dancing stages to choose from are the exact same as those in X, and most of the characters are not new, right down to their costumes (you can unlock 'recolors' of these costumes, however). Unfortunately as well, many of the little bothers from DDR X were not taken care of in X2. Specifically, it still takes an annoying amount of time for song previews to load and the frustrating X announcer makes a return.

The songlist of X2 pretty much follows the age-old DDR formula: over a dozen licensed tunes and a ton of material from Konami's popular BEMANI artists. There are a few aspects of X2's songlist that set it apart from other DDR games however, the first being the licenses. X2's license lists contains a total of 15 songs, quite the slim-down from SuperNOVA2 and X, which both contained a total of 26 licensed songs. The license list is made up almost exclusively of popular songs such as Rihanna's "Disturbia", Pink's "So What", and Lady GaGa's "Just Dance", which may make some fans cringe, but I personally thought the license list was made up of some great picks, and the fact that most of them contain their music videos certainly helped. Not so great? The song cuts and the stepcharts. To be fair, most of the song cuts are actually decent, but there are some what just made me flinch after listening to them. The Pussycat Doll's "When I Grow Up", for example, has one of lines from the first verse cut, causing the song to sound pretty strange for someone who's familiar with it. What's worse is that the inclusion of that line in the music cut would have still kept the song below 1:40. The stepcharts are also rather hit-and-miss for the licenses, as most of the songs contain painfully easy charts (The highest difficulty song in the licenses is Daft Punk is Playing At My House, which only comes in as a 10 on the X scale). While there are some fun charts in here (Let's Get it Started, La Camisa Negra), they are just too easy to present a challenge for many players.

The other 45 songs are made up of the usual heavy dose of Konami Originals, made up of revivals, songs taken from the Japanese releases, and brand new songs. The brand new songs in this game sound absolutely wonderful, as one might expect from artists like NAOKI, TOMOSUKE, jun, wac, and TAG, among many others. The songs expand many genres, from smooth songs like "Shine" and "Taking it to the Sky", to dance songs like "A Brighter Day" and "THIS NIGHT", and other genres like Rap (Crazy Control), Happy Hardcore (KIMONO♥PRINCESS), and J-Pop (Sacred Oath). These songs certainly blow X's new songlist of the water, which I thought was made up of some pretty generic and boring songs. Couple these new songs with some pretty good choices from the Japanese games (A Geisha's Dream, Blue Rain, ZERO, Moonster etc.) and some pretty sweet revivals (Love is Orange, Let the beat hit em! (CLASSIC R&B STYLE), L'amour et la liberté (DDR Ver.) etc, and it comes out to a pretty sweet list, even with some stinkers included (Did anyone really want the Groove Radar specials that badly? And what about Baile Le Samba and La Bamba?).

Luckily, the songlist from DDR X was improved without much harm done to the stepchart quality. Most of the charts for the Konami Originals are very fun and it seems Konami has finally listened to calls for difficulty, as nearly half of the new Konami Originals include challenge (oni) charts (not counting shock arrow charts), making for a great number of charts in between the 12-14 range. And yes, you read that right, shock arrows have made a dreadful return unfortunately. Ten songs feature shock arrow charts, which like DDR X, are just copy and pasted charts from other difficulties with shock arrows added in.

Of course, to access all the songs, you'll have to go through one of two unlock systems. First, you can just play the regular game modes with unlocks usually coming with every five songs you play. Secondly, you can try to tackle X2's "Dice Master Mode". This mode involved moving the DDR characters around a giant game board, eventually landing on different spaces which prompt missions that the player must complete in order to receive unlocks. To do this, the player is given one "character die", which designates which character is moved, and a regular die, which designates how many spaces that character will move. For each turn, the character throws both die and moves the characters accordingly, landing on missions and playing them. Although it should be noted that most missions have certain requirements to meet before they can be played. Some missions require your character to be a certain "level" (characters gain EXP as they play missions, which will increase their level), and others require that a combination of certain characters be standing on a space before the mission can be played. Although this all seems very interesting, it ends up just being too complicated for a game like DDR. The hoops you have to jump through just to get to certain missions are pretty ridiculous, not to mention the fact that some missions have impossible requirements (Let's just say that there is more than 1 "Get Marvelous Full Combo" missions). It certainly is refreshing to see them mix up the old mission-mode concept that's been present in recent DDR games, but simplicity is really a key goal here. Luckily, as I stated above, players who don't want to sink their teeth into that mode can simply play the regular game modes until they've unlocked all the songs.

Which brings me to my next point, there are only 60 songs on the full list. That's less than any other US PS2 release besides Disney Channel Edition. Even though I believe the songlist is enjoyable, the fact that it is limited to only 60 songs leaves a pretty bitter taste in my mouth.

So, to wrap it up, DDR X2 has a solid songlist that gets bogged down by an overly easy license list and its overall size. There is lots of great new material from beloved BEMANI artists, but unlocking it all can be somewhat of a pain if you don't have the patience for it.