Dance Dance Revolution is one of my favorite games to play. Not only does it have mostly good music to listen to, but it is very good at giving a nice cardio workout. I have lost roughly 60 lbs. playing this series, but now I’ll be talking about the newest home mix that I got to play – the X mix, for 2008 being the 10th year DDR was around.
When I first picked up this game, I was pretty excited to see what this game offered me. After I got a chance to play it, I am sorely disappointed at it, mostly for its execution and song selection.
The Good
So there were actually a couple of good things about this mix. If you actually care about knowing a little bit about the dancing characters that appear behind you as you’re dancing, then the story mode will be your favorite, as you’ll get to experience a story featuring each character, which will end up unlocking all the songs on the disc. If you don’t care about the story mode, you’ll basically end up playing this for at least 6 hours hating every minute of it to get all the songs, without using cheats.
Here are the songs I liked a lot on this mix, not in any order of preference:
- On the Bounce – Neuras
- 30 Lives (up-up-down-dance mix) – The Motion Sick – song video
- Big Girls Don’t Cry – Purefocus
- Boy (dj irene rockstar mix) – Book of Love
- Till the Lonely’s Gone – z-licious
- Dream Machine – Darwin
- Flourish – sonic-coll. feat. frances maya
- Puzzle – nippon shonen
- Tracers (4beat remix) – ruffage and size
- Uranus – tatsh sn2 style
The Bad and Ugly
There is a lot left to be desired from this mix. The story mode was quite long (though I enjoyed it), and you had to play through every character in order to unlock all the songs. This made you play through a lot of songs on low difficulties just to get the right to play them in the regular mode. Also, extra stage on this mix is not set to oni life mode of battery level 2. This means that one can only break their combo 2 times on the extra stage (which is already poorly synced to begin with), and not the traditional no recovery mod on. Also, many of the songs are synced poorly – they either have arbitrary stops in them, and fluxuate in the scroll rate, even though the song doesn’t change tempo. That highly irritates me – I’ll have to spend more work resyncing it to be playable on Stepmania. Also, most of the songs aren’t that awesome, and are just kind of “there”. The worst offenders are listed below, some of them hyperlinked so you can see how bad they are.
Also, this mix is heavily weighted to low 6 and 7 foot difficulty, with only a few songs at supremely high difficulties. This provides few opportunities for someone to build up their stamina and speed to play the harder boss songs. In addition, the higher songs are stepped for the elite – making this mix one of the hardest top end mixes out there, with long streams of 800 BPM steps, sometimes with crossovers. In addition, the game still feels like it triplets aren’t quantized correctly, even though the game has 10 times to try and fix this syncing error. Hopefully this will get fixed soon, and also the mixes will be better balanced for both the beginners, and top end players, as I feel with the current path of songs and syncing, this game will probably lose it charm and appeal to those who aren’t already players.
Now here are the “bad songs”:
- Pluto
- Pluto Relinquish
- Saber Wing – (akira ishihara headshot mix) (EXTRA STAGE)
- Trigger – the new “hardest” song
- Girigili Burning 24hi
- Poseidon – good song, just synced poorly
- Saber Wing
Have fun with this, and please feel free to comment.