DanceDanceRevolution A (AC)

Felt fine to me when I played it.

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Chocolate Philosophy has some fun DDP/EDP charts.

High School Love has an amazing DDP as well.

Good additions, I love them both.

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love what they did with Chocolate Philosophy, very fun.
High School Love is neat, looking forward to playing it.

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Could have just been the night I played it since the syncing on a lot of songs was a bit wonky on my local Ace machine. I was referring to the chart. did feel fine for the most part.

I know the feeling. My local machine has been desyncing a lot over the past month or so.

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That and Love is Dreaminess (accidentally cut the quote with that song as well) is all I need to be happy.

As for Ultramix, I only recall Midnite Blaze SySF mix being the song that I haven't seen in PS2 US that I'd like to see in an arcade release. Heck maybe even make a challenge chart that acts like Right on Time (Ryu* mix) and Dynamite Rave Air Special.

First of all, you haven't even played ddr A, so why on earth do you want console songs you can play at home ported to the arcade?

That being said, there's definitely some great songs that deserve to be ported to the arcade, if they could ever relicense the songs. To name a few, gyruss, colors remix, G2, guidecca, Franklin, insaner, insaner remix, love me do, Go!, etc.

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I'm pretty sure Konami at least owns the full distribution rights to the Or-If-Is and Jondi & Spesh songs that were made specifically for them as I've asked before (for FFR).

Port over Love Me Do, Mad Blast, Lament Configuration and Tesla Coil and give us some new 18s. Infinite Prayer, Tsugaru and Exotic Ethnic remixes and G2 would also make some dope 16s.

I think they want nothing to do with the Ultramix/Universe series. I'm sure in regards to the X2 stuff, it was due to timing more than anything. It wasn't just Universe 3 songs that got added, but there were also Hottest Party 3 and X2 CS crossovers, and at that time there was also US support for X2. Would make since to just add in songs from the recent console versions at the time if you are planning on doing it for even just one of them, especially for songs like Dirty Digital (kors k's first DDR original).

Ace has had zero US support. There is no way they are going to add in stuff like Insaner or anything at this point.

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not to mention most of the universe 3 additions were famous BEMANI artists that provided songs for IIDX, including DM Ashura who made neogenesis for IIDX 16 EMPRESS prior to X2, so they wouldn't really add anything for the Xbox artists

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Does Konami own the rights to that True Love Clubstars remix from a few years ago? Or Touble Tornard (Tornado?)?

I'd love to be able to play those on a cab.

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i'm pretty sure they do, but they won't use them bc cs songs aren't being added anymore

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All the best to the American finalists next week!

I can explain. There isn't DDR A in Puerto Rico, but Dave and Busters has made a step up to the community so we can holler about so they bring DDR A to Puerto Rico

Other than that, I did want to port over my opinion on the topic. Nothing wrong there, I suppose?

FINAL ROUND
The 7th KAC finalists participe on 2018-02-10 and are:
East Japan entry (1): ZEROWOLF
East Japan entry (2): HO4-KETI
West Japan entry: YUDAI
Asia entry: RINON
Korea entry: FEFEMZ
US entry: FUNGAH
The 6th KAC champion: Chris 4 Life
P.D.: Sorry for the Google transtator.

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Since we're likely nearing the end of DDR A's life cycle, I'll dump a big rant about not just this game, but about the franchise's place in the rhythm game genre as a whole.
First, a few interesting bits of statistics. IIDX Sinobuz, a game released half a year after DDR A and replaced by a newer version two months ago, with around 100 new songs (102? might have miscounted), has only 5 songs without a chart in 10-12 range. The remaining 97 ones' hardest charts are roughtly evenly distributed between 10, 11 and 12, with 11s being slightly more numerous.
By comparison DDR A also has around 96 new songs, but 78% of them don't have any chart above 14 difficulty level. The hardest charts of the remaining songs are: one 19, five 18s, six 17s, seven 16s, two 15s (again, may have miscounted). So 22% songs that can be taken seriously by good players, and only 12% that have place in high-level tournament play.
Pump It Up, another dance game franchise that's one year younger than DDR, has accumulated around thirty singles charts in 22-24 range (roughly equivalent to DDR 19s) compared to DDR's 5, as well as three 25/26s (DDR doesn't have any equivalents yet). DDR has gotten less than thirty 18s so far, less than Pump 22-24s in its entire history and less than IIDX 11s introduced in Sinobuz alone.
Comparing DDR to IIDX is somewhat unfair, as no other rhythm game in existence has such a ridiculous difficulty distribution. But DDR itself stands at the opposite end of the spectrum, and not just by BEMANI standards.
There is certainly a factor of skill level of Japanese core playerbase, the one Konami pays a degree of attention to. There's only a dozen or so of Japanese players capable of semi-consistently passing Valkyrie Dimension with a bearable >900k score. That number would instantly drop to 0 on a 20. They could obviously still pass it with the power of good old bracket mashing, thanks to Konami removing Boo window during Supernova era, but this very fact completely devalues the achievement of passing anything in DDR - again, completely unique to this franchise.
But even though 19s are already so hard, you could expect them to instead flood the upper echelon of players with charts in 15-18 range, by analogy to IIDX, PIU and hell, majority of rhythm games. Nope, they didn't. After introducing a few 18s in Supernova as a kneejerk reaction to ITG, they've only bothered making a handful of dedicated 15s and 16s alongside them, still keeping well over 80% of songlists in the familiar <15 territory the first five mixes haven't ventured past.
Looking at the bigger picture, it's pretty obvious that Konami has envisioned DDR as a franchise aimed predominantly at passerby casuals to draw them in with the concept of limited dancing and a large assortment of licensed songs. This is the attitude they have stuck with and they'll likely keep it to the bitter end. They've had the exact opposite attitude with Beatmania, treating it like an arcade game for hardcore arcade gamers - once the latter have proven to get the hang of the game, Konami has inflated its difficulty within a span of a couple years without caring whether any current player could pass it (V SPA, the first 12, came out as early as 2001). It's doubtful that Japanese playerbase would have been able to keep up with this kind of difficulty creep in DDR, but since Konami hasn't tried, we will never know.
DDR fad is long gone, especially in Japan. Its popularity among not only casuals, but arcade enthusiasts has been eclipsed by Sound Voltex - a newcomer that usurped its place among the top 3 BEMANI games alongside IIDX and pop'n. I can definitely see Konami attempting to axe the franchise altogether by replacing it with Dance Rush, which has much more potential to attract DDR's intended target audience. And no, they won't give a single fuck about its very strong niche in USA and its growing community, or even the two dozen or so remaining "hardcore" DDR players in their home country. If anything USA's upcoming total domination (FEFEMZ is about to quit for at least two years, no promising young talent to replace him in either Japan or Korea in sight) may only encourage Konami to pull the plug out.

Yeah, it's yet another doompost. But there's been a lot to be worried about lately.

Yeah. It's obvious. I don't understand how that is bad.

They know a lot of their players are not going to be able to complete harder charts. The game is designed with Extra Stage NOT being achieved by most players every time they play. It's designed to where getting a full combo is rewarded with a bit of fanfare to encourage doing better. It's designed with patterns like spins to ensure replayability and enjoyment. It's designed with Basic and Difficult actually being fun to play to continuously get people to play without being overwhelmed.

If all you care about are harder stuff to play and you can AAA pretty much everything up to a 15/16 without even trying, Konami does not consider you their target audience anymore. They aren't completely leaving you in the dark though. Extra Exclusives were challenging enough, and Rinon's Adventure added more complicated charts to appease you. At the same time, they got you right where they wanted you: a long grind that required lots of credits that leads up to a song exclusive only to those that have finished that long grind, and then an Encore Extra Stage that is not entirely meant to be passed every time that resets you to do a grind that you must do within a 24 hour timeframe. Even better? You are going to do it because it is there.
The scoreboards as well are another tactic to get you to replay. Can you FPC a song? Great, but is it the machine/area record? Maybe you can do better, so you try again.

They get credits from the more experienced players by throwing exclusive content behind a credit grind. They get credits from lesser players by giving them a lot of content to come back to. As such, DDR achieves its goal as an arcade game in a public space.

Pump does the same thing. Saying it has a higher percentage of harder charts and comparing them to DDR is not only unfair, but it is just outright wrong. Pump has a lot of harder stuff, sure, but the game is also designed around combos, not accuracy, which changes how their chart design can work.

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While DDR probably is lacking in high level charts relative to other Bemani and non-Bemani music games (though I'm not certain how much so, as I don't pay any significant attention to the general difficulty trend of any of them other than DDR, IIDX, and SDVX (to a degree)), comparing IIDX's 10-12 range to the 15+ range in DDR really skews the comparison; getting into 10s on IIDX isn't nearly as a big of a wall (relative to general progression in each game) as getting into 15s in DDR. The comparison would be much more logical if it were comparing IIDX's 11-12 range to DDR's 15+ range, since 11s in IIDX are actually a huge wall in general progression similar to 15s in DDR, and 12s in IIDX cover a huge range of difficulty even excluding Black Another/Legenddaria 12s (I'm really wondering why they haven't split 12s into 12s and 13s yet).

10s in IIDX are probably more comparable to the 13-14 range in DDR. And DDR has had a notable increase of songs in that range; even songs that are likely put in to appeal to non-Bemani fans (licenses, the recent idol songs, etc.) occasionally have 13s, and compared to where the series was at DDR X's release (when there were almost no 14s), there are way more 14s now.

Though with how long it took to get a Challenge chart in DDR A, high difficulty is definitely not their priority with DDR.

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The DDR section of KAC should be starting shortly!

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No New DDR Mix yet.

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