DanceDanceRevolution (Wii) (International)

So I have to say, after watching neodude's videos (thanks for those!), I have a better opinion of the stepcharts overall. Though I still think many of them could use a good Challenge chart, they're definitely not bad and have a fun vibe going for them. They kind of remind me of EXTREME-era step styles, actually, and that's definitely not a bad thing. I look forward to your other videos, because clearly for me, the issue is the shitfest that is the PS3 visuals and I actually can't figure out what's going on. Thankfully the Wii version maintains some taste and keeps to the standard DDR visual style with the tried and true noteskin and fairly low-key note explosions.

Bottom line, DDR Wii, as a successor to the HP series, is a good installment, it moves that series forward. It's no X2, but it's a suitable evolution for the Wii games. And somehow, the PS3 version manages to be worlds worse with virtually the same song list (ok I'll shut up about the PS3 version now ).

One thing that is a little weird is how we went from 30 licenses in HP3 to 20 here, especially because overall these licenses don't seem as popular or as suited to DDR. That's really the only place I feel this game is much weaker than HP3; though the steps for the licenses are a lot better, the choices most definitely are not.

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Yeah, the lower amount of licenses does bother me. But this is the second time someone here has said that the game is overall stronger than HP3, which has me really excited to get the game for myself since I loved HP3 (and still do).

The licenses are probably the weakest in the series IMO. The low count of them actually doesn't bother me much, it's the picks that do. If it weren't for the charts, many of them would put me to sleep. Some of them are good though, and a couple of them have grown on me pretty well despite me being somewhat against them in the beginning.

However, the KO's are an improvement over last year as there's actually more musical variety this year than before, and it's not overly flooded with Naoki. And holy crap, Ever Snow finally crosses the pond, in extended form, with it's original chart intact! Rescue Me, despite it's DDRS history, is also a good addition and A Geisha's Dream was completely unexpected. That, along with the rest of them (SEASONS!!!!) make for a pretty strong KO list overall. The only songs I'm not entirely feeling are Win The Game (DKC Crew just needs to stop with that...) and Downtown (weirded me out at first and STILL does).

A few of the charts feel a bit questionable overall, but after a bit more play time with it, it's definitely not a deal breaker and holy crap are they better than the majority of what HP3 got. These actually felt like they did more kicking and screaming, and that's what I want! The only really difficult charts in HP3 aside from the boss songs was La Libertad, What Will Come of Me, You Are A Star (because it REQUIRED 6 panel play to AAA) and the FFP revivals. With this game, many of the charts, even in the licenses actually put up a sizable fight. Love Like This was totally unexpected along with the ending of According To You among others. Then there's the KO's that finally got both the variety and for the majority of it, the charts right. (the only other really good KO list on Wii was HP2 IMO and that game had a LOT of questionable charts in that section) On the other hand, whoever did the Expert steps for A Geisha's Dream (ruffage remix) needs to be dragged out into the street and forced to play that for a week until it sinks in that the chart is trash. And Rescue Me is a double edged sword IMO. It could've used a new chart, but at the same time not everybody unlocked Memories on DDR Extreme US so in a way I can kinda see why they did what they did here.

As for other parts of the game, Choreograph mode is exactly what Hyper Move Mode should've been last year. It's much more fun and more challenging. Yeah, you can get away with a lot of movements that the dancers DON'T do because the game looks for specific states that the controller is in for all of the blue notes and yellow holds. (Ex, for windups you just gotta make sure you're moving and don't stop, and for holds you don't do too much moving) However, the red notes (punch markers) and steps are still just as strict as ever so don't expect awesome grades to come out of nowhere if you screw around too much. The real challenge to this mode is doing this on Expert, as there are no prompts to go by. Unlike Just Dance, they don't even give you clues so in essence you either know the routine from playing on Difficult or you FAIL. It's that simple. Will it get the Just Dance crowd's attention? Unless they're looking for something with a bit more challenge in it I seriously doubt it, as that is strictly tailored for parties and it got full length licenses, some of which this game should've got cuts of. Not to mention that it STILL gives you prompts to some degree and you can't really fail it.

Balance Board mode has also been improved in two important areas, difficulty and movement. Last year, like with the foot charts, the Balance Board was easier in the licenses than the KOs though the difficulty chasm wasn't as wide. This year, they arguably play more like KOs than the foot charts do. Also, the only other issue I had with this mode last year was that while it was an excellent new mode to the game, outside of the punch markers there wasn't a whole lot of movement you had to do. This year's game rectified that with the step notes. If you're familiar with Wii Fit's aerobic dance mode, you'll know exactly what this entails as it works pretty much the same way. Some steps will make you go forward, some to the side, some to the back. The timing on these are very lenient, as long as your foot is off/on the board when it scrolls past the receptor you're good. However, in combination with the hip notes this can get very difficult to deal with balance wise. You'll have to come up with new techniques. So far, the best I've done is a FC and a few AAs. I don't see AAAs happening anytime soon.

Overall, my view on this game is that if you do get it, get it for the overall high chart quality, the KO's, and the improvements in the other modes. If you actually like the licenses in this year's game, get it for those too. Otherwise don't be in it for the licenses, as you're gonna be out of luck this year. There's less of them than ever before on Wii, and they're also not the best picks in the world either.

Well said, darknight. Thanks for sharing your overall thoughts.

I bought it today and I can do a review too...

AMAZING!!!


That is all.

Honestly though I must say with the song list (mostly KO's I'm talking about here) and the new modes, Choreography mode is awesome, it really makes it one of the best home version DDR games ever.

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Still working on the videos.... but as far as my impressions go.....
Songs:
The licenses are pretty bland, I'm happy the reduced the number, but the choices aren't particularly suited for DDR sans a few. The charts are still too easy, but are a step up from HP3. The KOs on the other hand are more impressive, but forgetable. Only a few stand out to me, my favorite probably being Seasons. Some are just downright disasters like The Island Song or Downtown. I was hoping the DDR X song gang wouldn't be back for another round, but obviously Konami must see something in them I don't. Also, Double Tornard.
Graphics:
This is the lowest point of the game for me, they worked a little TOO hard here. The combo animations piss me off as do the majority of the bg movies. They blend in with the arrows all too well and I found myself more often than not losing my combo because of them, see my videos as reference for this. While not as bad as the PS3 game, they went a little too far. On the plus side, the characters and their routines are much improved.
Gameplay:
Same as ever, except that goods count toward your combo. I wish they didn't change it, but at least there's a little more consistency in the Bemani series now. Also, the blue Full Combo Finish font looks kinda cool when you get a good somewhere in your combo as opposed to a PFC or SDG. This could use edit mode or something similar to boot. Also, why no doubles for the fourth time? I do not have a balance board and I really haven't experimented with choreo yet.
Charts:
Best in the Wii series I suppose. I really have no grips about the KO charts. Most of my complaints lie in the seizure inducing bg animations and the poor license selection.

I don't know, the BG movies haven't really bothered me at all since nothing I've seen here gets to be as bad as playing Paranoia Eternal on DDR Extreme, where if you play with a mod some of the movies scroll upward as fast as the arrows. None of these seem to move fast enough to be a distraction. Including Crazy Love. I dunno, maybe this also has something to do with me playing with Solo/Rainbow arrows too.

I've just noticed something with Crazy Love. The PS3 and the Wii chart are different in step placement toward the end. WTF is with that?

edit: In options go into Dance and select OFF for Full Combo Appeal or Last Appeal for the light show to only happen at the end. That turns off the 50, 100, and 200 combo visual splashes. You can't shut the song specific animations behind the dancers off though, but this should help you a little bit.

According to VGChartz (Which is questionable, I know), the Wii installment sold an impressive 23,000 copes in its first week. That is very good, considering that Hottest Party 3 took 6 weeks to reach such a number, and had a more impressive license list.

The PS3 game did not fair quite as well, only selling about 10,000 copies its first week. Still, it beats the heck out of X2's sales thus far. Should these numbers continue to out due last year's, I'd say DDR will survive on the US consoles for at least one more year.

Wow, that is great! I imagine the boxart helped its case a bit, if you know what I mean.

Oh it's under dance? There was some combo option under graphics that I tinkered with, but it really didn't do anything about that. Ah well, still doesn't fix the animations which are my biggest issue . I wish there was at least a way to turn the brightness down like the Universe series and make the background black haha

True, if they were going to have movies anywhere in the game a brightness option should've been in the graphics section somewhere. You'd think this would be common sense, as every PS2 game and arcade release had this option somewhere but here, nope. Granted I'll give them credit for one thing, at least though backgrounds don't mess with the framerate like they would on Universe.

Maybe it's just me as well, but I would've also liked to have had the option to turn off the flicker filter too. HP1 and 2 didn't use it, HP3 started using it and apparently they haven't looked back since. I didn't like it when they started forcing it on the PS2 titles after Extreme 2 either. My monitor can actually display crisp images. I like crisp images, don't rob me of them.

I love the look of the animations personally. Same with the Combo Appeal, really liked that in HP3. And some of the animations for that aspect look even better here.

So, would getting the Wii version over rule getting the PS3 Version, even with the possibility of DLC for the PS3? Thats the only reason Im looking at sticking with the Sony Software.

That's gonna depend entirely on what they release for DLC. Even then in theory it'll probably be older songs that you can play on an infinitely better engine on a PS2 release. Personally, I have all the major PS2 releases, so unless the DLC is something that hasn't been brought to the US and or new, I see no good reason for the PS3 game right now as much of everything else about it just screams "slapped together".

At this point, I'm not even sure X2 DLC would make the shitty PS3 interface worth it. Could you imagine Valkyrie dimension on that ridiculous interface? It would be actually unplayable.

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Not that I'm surprised, but it's a shame that the Wii version didn't get DLC. It would not only mean new songs with step charts, but they'd actually have to put forth effort into the routines for the Choreograph mode.

The DLC is not worth it for me because of lack of doubles and edit mode. All my favorite edit steps would be useless and I could not even edit a bastardized double chart using edit for versus or something

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I'm not surprised either, it's not that they can't do it as Pop N' Wii does it as well as Samba De Amigo. It's that if they did do it there, especially with SD/SDHC card support, there would be zero reason for many to get the PS3 game aside from aesthetics unless they both got different DLC, which I can't see making any sort of sense on the Konami business side of things.

Ain't the average audio file still 2MB? Either way, I know the games don't stream audio from the disc during play, it's all loaded into memory which means they can't be that large. I would think even with a 2GB card, that's a whole ton of DDR audio it could hold.

The audio files are 4mb each, and are all packed into one encrypted file called "DDRHP4". They're all named "MU_DDR_0xx.rwav". There are 67 "songs", but some of them are dummy songs, which are all an identical 2-minute loop. The dummy songs don't have any banners or song previews. Song previews all have their own unique files.

I don't think there's any good reason to exclude DLC from the game, except that giving us DLC means putting the steps in their own small file, and essentially handing that file to us on an SD-Card. The moment we have that file to compare against the other files on the disc, we'll be able to figure out the location and format of the steps, and possibly be able to inject our own code into the file, giving us customisable Wii mixes.

.. That, or Nintendo doesn't want DLC on it's console?

Konami's to blame here, not Nintendo. Interesting that they're encrypted as "DDRHP4"....