I just discovered Hou and I'm mad

So, I've been reconnecting with DDR a lil bit after years away (thanks, no arcades having it around me!), and I'm catching up on the big dogs in the 19 space. I recently saw BREAKING THE FUTURE and it's crazy, but the song is awesome and the chart, as bonkers as it is, looks fun to play!

Then, I saw Hou, the most recent 19.

It's been a while since I've seen pure unfiltered hate oozing out of a chart!! Attack mod Sudden, +1 and -1 BPM changes in the stop bursts, have to GFC it (and that used to be PFC?!), on top of some of the cruelest and whacked out charting I've ever seen from DDR (counting every other boss before it!). The game has definitely changed since I was in it!

The catalyst for this thread was really those minuscule tempo changes. Like, knowing this had to be PFCed before they nerfed that, it's hostility I am pretty unfamiliar with and when I saw them, really blindsided me with how unflinchingly petty that is, lmao. At least you can hear MAXX UNLIMITED and Pluto's small changes, this is blatantly trying to troll out a Great, it's incredible.

And this is still a 19!! THIS ISN'T THE LIMIT!!



I love this so much.

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Holy shit it's you! Get on with BMSSCFZIVBWNOSLGTPSogmcc! Simfile Contest II.

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Even without the requirement to PFC it, and even without the sudden mod being forced upon the player, I still think Hou is the hardest 19 for how hard it is to read and memorize. Although, apparently I'm in the minority on that and from what I've seen, most will say Endymion is still the hardest. Look that one up if you haven't yet, the song is badass.

ENDYMION CSP should be a 20.

On the flip side, the extreme top of doubles 18's should be 19's, and EGOISM 440 and ENDYMION CDP need to be 20's.

I could go on about this, but I'd be echoing what many others have said for years.

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Nah fuq it, you know you wanna see what Konami have that they think is harder than a '19'.

I'm mostly disconnected from modern DDR as well, I fell off hard after Supernova 2 released, but it really does seem like they keep moving the goalposts just to not call anything a 20.

That or we've all just been assuming 20 even exists in the scale since 2008 and it actually maxes at 19.

Lol sure keep watch on the 26th if I don't forget


ENDYMION is rad as hell and super hard too!!! It feels like it kind of... I don't know, it kind of earns it in a "I don't hate you but I will absolutely destroy you" way? It feels grand, majestic. It's not actively out for blood like Hou is, it just is a 19 because that's how it was naturally written. It's a triumph rather a horror.

Rewatching both, there is a definite tonal dissonance between them: ENDYMION commands respect, while Hou demands it.


It wouldn't surprise me if both ENDYMION and Hou CSP eventually got rerated once Konami finally breaks the threshold. I admittedly am not terribly familiar with the doubles 19s, I should check them out!


Honestly I feel like it's fear by this point, since once they break it, players will know the limits. Or, perhaps they're waiting for the day when players pass the challenge without nerfs and reward them with a weapon to surpass Metal Gear.

Trivia!
-From DDR 1st Mix to DDRMAX, the upper limit of 10 feet was defined in just three years. It would only take just over one year to redefine it with flashing 10s.
-DDR X introduced the modern scale in 2008. In the nearly 16 years since then, we've yet to have the upper limit defined, but boy, are we close.

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No one really knew what flashing 10 meant though.

-Sakura didn’t flash in Extreme AC/JP but flashed in Festival, then didn’t flash in Extreme 2.
-Outer Limits also flashed in Festival. Mad Blast didn’t. Neither song has a modern rating, just including for completeness.
-Legend of Max flashed in Extreme AC/JP but not in Extreme US.
-Max 300 SMMM heavy does not flash in Strike, while Challenge does.
-In Extreme AC/JP both heavy and challenge flash for Paranoia Survivor Max. In Extreme 2, heavy does not flash but challenge does.
-The 10 rating debuted in MAX2 AC in June of 2002. MAX AC had no ratings and MAX US added them but launched in October 2002.
-Nothing flashed in SuperNOVA which definitely needed it if it was a measure of difficulty.

Personally, I think it was just used to denote what was considered a boss song/chart for a game and not that it’s pushing the boundary of what a 10 was.

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I live near you and i agree theres literally nothing here in TN. All we got is a Prime 2 GX cabinet i upgrade a few months back in Bristol. But yeah i've been out of the loop here recently too and i dont keep up with the harder boss songs. Last one i really know is EON BREAK. Don't really care too much since we cant even play it (On AC PAD)

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It does make me pretty nostalgic for the ancient times where we wondered what the next difficult 10 might look like, and when we saw it it wasn’t so difficult that it might give someone a hernia.

In retrospect I feel like the 1-20 scale was entirely unnecessary and not useful, and it might’ve been a better move around the time of DDR X to keep the 1-10 scale but do some severe downgrading in ratings, so that only the top tier stuff remained a 10.

I'm pretty sure Sudden is only forced on for event purposes, to prevent the speed mod x0.25 spoiler strat that people used on Over The Period.

Also the Encore Stage doesn't use either a GFC or PFC lifebar - it uses a special lifebar that goes down by 0% for Marvelouses, 30% for Misses, and 1% for Perfects, so you can PFC it and still fail. FEFEMZ's livestream infamously had several cases of red bar and gold combo displaying at the same time. To drive in how crazy this lifebar is - the current WR for Over The Period would fail it.

You should listen to the very-obviously-super-off-sync 16th notes in Ace For Aces, which had to be PFC'd. It occurs at 292-296 combo. (make sure hand clap/assist tick is on)

+1

The shape and color of the DDR X difficulty bar certainly implies that 20 is the intended maximum.

My headcanon is that the 20th anniversary was supposed to debut a 20, but then COVID screwed up all the plans (and obviously no one wants the bad press of a major in-person event promotion during a pandemic).

If I recall correctly, Naoki said something in an interview like "we very specifically didn't want Max 300 to become a 9, because that would damage how iconic it is".

I think instead of doing the 1-20 rescale I wonder if it wouldn't be better to do what other rhythm games are doing and add "fractional" difficulties in the top end, like keep the 1-10 scale but add a 7+, 8+ and 9+ rating to better differentiate in the high-end charts. But I think the current state is still better than IIDX's 12 rating just losing all meaning by having a too wide range of difficulty under a single difficulty label banner.

The change to the difficulty scale was absolutely necessary. Even ignoring Naoki's sentiment regarding Max 300, re-rating songs downward so the absolute hardest songs are always a 10 and everything else is somewhere below would dilute the lower difficulty ratings (including 9) far too much for them to have any meaning. At this point, Max 300 itself would probably be a 7, and then you're mashing everything easier than that somewhere in the 1-6 range.

You'd just end up with the same issue that made itself apparent in SN1/2, but instead of the absurd range of difficulty at the highest end you'd have an absurd range at every point below the highest end and that's much, much worse.

I realize this is speaking with the benefit of hindsight and that other games have successfully shown this could work, but maybe you could've kept the then hardest songs at 10 and then ADD ratings as charts escalated? Like if a song comes that is absolutely way harder that other charts of your current max rating, you assign it a rating of max+1.

I’m sure this is teetering on the appeal to authority fallacy, if not another one, but I feel like if that really worked then StepManiaX would have kept that (since you’re just describing the ITG scale) rather than making their own that is even more expanded than DDR’s. Sure, DDR has its songs on the upper and lower end of a rating still, but at the very least what is the upper and lower end of a 9 in ITG is like 4 ratings in DDR giving you a much clearer idea of what you’re getting yourself into.

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