Dance Dance Revolution Extreme

"I really don't see whats the big fuss all about, this game stinks."

Well, its almost been 2 years since this game came out and I think I had enough time to play with it and give it a proper review straight from my heart.

Dance Dance Revolution is quite possibly the world's most famous music/dance simulation game. Its been around since the late 1990's and apparently I find it's current popularity in the United States very amusing. Part of me says its been 6 years, have you been living under a rock? But that's a whole different thing. Through the years there have been like over a dozen versions of the game, but officially Extreme is the 8th Mix edition of DDR.

DDR Extreme pretty much gives me a sign that this will be the last arcade mix in Japan. The series is at a complete rot and it rarely has any fans there anymore. I was recently in Japan a few months ago with my boyfriend and we went to the arcades, no DDR in sight. It was all obscure games and other music games like Beatmania IIDX or Pop N' Music.

The main emphasis for this version is to pretty much tie up the whole series in one package. It has 240 songs, most veterans will find the songs, old, and something they have heard a billion times before. It barely has any new songs at all. Which really sucks. Do I really want to play BUTTERFLY again after whoring it on 1st to 5th Mix? So I turn to the “new” songs which is a whopping 20 song collection. It has the licensed tunes like CARTOON HEROES (SPEEDY MIX), SPEED OVER BEETHOVEN, WE WILL ROCK YOU, WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS, I DO I DO I DO, and a few more. As for brand new songs from Konami themselves, it has your classic NAOKI style songs like GRADUATION, HYPER EUROBEAT, TEARS, et cetera. Again not many good songs from this group so I move on to the songs taken from other music games. Though it's a good idea transplanting songs from other games to DDR, they completely burned out the idea here folks. What happens here is a collection of songs from various BEMANI games like Colors (IIDX), Pink Rose (KeyboardMania), Daikenkai (Pop N‘ Music), Across the nightmare (GuitarFreaks/DrumMania), HOLD ON ME (ParaPara Paradise), feeling of love (BM III), and 321 STARS (Beatmania). The game lacks any originality at all. It depends on music taken from other superior media. I call this lazy development.

The game still pretty much plays the same though. If you don't know how to play DDR, well, give my regards to the queen of the rock.

The bottom line this game was certainly not developed for me. But I am still entitled to my own opinion and IMO this game is a 1/10. For lack of any original ideas and very dated gameplay. It's a bad expansion.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 09/10/04