Dance Dance Revolution Extreme

"Great idea + great series + great songs + ignoring the US = a not good ddr game"

DDR, or Dance Dance Revolution, was an idea that was sparked in 1998 by Konami. And a great idea it was. This review will tell all about how the latest addition to the DDR games in the US doesn't deserve the title of "DDR"

Gameplay: 7/10
Yep, it's DDR. If you do not know what DDR is, it's a game where you stand on a pad with four directional arrows (up down left and right) and you need to step on the arrows with your feet when the colored arrows on the screen get to the top of the screen. It's simply the most addicting and fun game ever. So why did I give this a 7? Because anybody who can pass 8-foots (8/10 in difficulty) can complete 95% of this game. There are scarcely any 9-foots (what a hardcore player like me wants to see) and only one 10-foot. They didn't even put the HARDEST ten foot in, that's how stupid they were when they designed this game. HELLO? This is the fourth game in the US (that I know of). Everybody who has wanted to play DDR in the US pretty much has and by this point can play MUCH harder songs then the wide array of 6-foot Heavy songs Konami just threw at us. There's also a Mission Mode where you do various parts of songs. They ask you to do something with the song like "never press the down arrow when it appears." This had potential to be great, but it wasn't due to the lack of difficulty until the last 5 missions or so which took three hours to complete each.

Music Selection: 5/10
This is what I hated most about DDR Extreme for the US. What's the extreme part about it? When the box said DDR EXTREME I was pretty darn sure that there would be more than 10 songs from the arcade version of EXTREME on it. Woah was I wrong. Actually there are like 15 songs from Extreme, but pretty much none of them are good. Where's Cartoon Heroes? Sakura? Paranoia Survivor? Paranoia Survivor Max? Dance Dance Revolution (the song)? Destiny Lovers? Irresisisisisisis (however you spell it) tiblement? Colors? The title should have been DDR USA 2 or DDR Tries-to-be-EXTREME mix. There aren't a whole lot of good songs from other mixes either. .59, Wonderland and Do Me are the only three good songs from previous DDRs I can think of right now that are on this game. I can still recite ten or eleven from DDR Konamix and DDR MAX for the USA. Very dissapointing. Also, the US-exclusives just simply suck in this game. Move Your Feet and YMCA are pretty darn cool, but Don't Clock Me and Go West together count as 30 bad songs they're so terrible. They have a mix of Believe, a pretty cool song, but when you consider how much times they repeat the chorus at the end, it is not a good dancing song. They have a crappy mix of Like a Virgin. Need I say more...

Graphics/Layout: 5/10
The layout of DDR Extreme is terrible. It's not the arcade-style at all. They basically ressurected the layout from DDR Konamix, only made it worse. The songs go from left to right instead of down to up, the songs are only color-coded by white and red (in otherwords, hard or not hard) and everything looks terrible. Ick.

Replay Value: 3/10
Wow, considering there are a whopping 8 songs to play and not explode doing so, this is an EXTREMEly great DDR! Get it? Ha ha! That was major sarcasm by the way.

All together: 20/40 reduced to a 5/10.
This game has not a hint of extremeness to it. The title is wrong. The songs stink. The layout is weird and un-usable. This just does not fit the title of "DDR."

Buy/Rent?
Rent and play those good songs on the mix. You'll be done in a few days but hey that's why I said rent it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05