"DDR songs are offsync"

I keep hearing certain "high level" players say this about DDR in general. Not even sure if it matters which game, (Extreme, Supernova, X, 2013) but they tend to complain about a majority of the series rather than specific songs. Is this true...? I really can't tell.

There are a handful of ones like bag that everyone knows about (which everyone says was fixed later), some CS songs that drift, someone told me Highs off U drifts or something, and honestly the only one I could legitimately tell was off was Healing-D-Vision in the Supernova era... at least from watching it, fudge if I can pass that. The other more common oddly synced songs escape me right now. That's not that many.

I've heard people say "everything after Supernova is offsync," then someone playing some Extreme-age song complaining that it was offsync. Are offsync songs really that prevalent in DDR or are these groundless claims? And if they're true... um, how are people getting all these PFCs and I'm guessing increasing MFCs? From a lazy player, it just feels like a reason non-DDR-but-some-other-dance-game players made up to be rude to DDR players based on like five-to-ten songs out of a hundred zillion. But I'm not banking on that being the case; just want to hear the truth from DDR players.

Also, anyone want to name some of the notably offsync songs I missed?

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DDR cares about which frame of animation is being drawn on the screen, when you press the panel.

Stepmania and ITG care about how many milliseconds have passed between you pressing the panel, and the game expecting you to press the panel.

The concept of 'sync' comes from Stepmania, and doesn't really translate very well to DDR, because DDR works in terms of frames, not in terms of milliseconds. At the highest level of play, songs on a DDR machine play very differently from a Stepmania machine, and different versions of DDR play drastically different from others.

If someone wants to devote themselves to MFCing all the songs in Supernova, then they certainly can, but if they then move over to playing EuroMIX 2, then tiny details of the game engine will be different, and you'd have to learn the subtleties all over again. In any case, what you're doing is learning when the game wants you to press the panel, and how the game is conveying that to you. Sometimes, the game conveys that very badly, which gives the same effect as the game being 'offsync' in Stepmania, but if you were to investigate what the game actually wants you to do, and work on doing that, then anything is MFC-able.

Apparently there was some screen lag in X on the new cabinets, but that was patched. Seems like these days sync is generally good and I rarely hear people mention it anymore, especially since they can patch it. The most recent game I've been able to play was X2 and it seemed pretty good then, but I only got to play it for a short while.

But I know pre-patch SuperNOVA's Xepher drifted pretty badly, I recall it being really late. MY SUMMER LOVE in MAX CS US scrolled at a BPM slightly faster than it should have been, by the end of the song it was really early. I'm sure there's others, but it's been a long time.

Stuff like Healing-D-Vision and bag used the wrong note quantization. Healing-D-Vision incorrectly used 16ths rather than triplets, and everything using triplets before X was actually using 64ths, making them slightly off where they should be.

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It's more of a glaring issue on older mixes (not that newer mixes are perfect either but definitely an improvement). A number of the bad sync cases also just have shitty waveforms that are drifty by nature and just a pain to keep on sync at all times, others just have completely incorrect quantization as mentioned above.

Not that other rhythm games are free of this. Pump has quite a number of offsync stuff, ITG officials has shit like One False Move and Utopia (and plenty of people making custom content still don't really know what they're doing with sync), I don't know about IIDX but given the tight windows on that game I wouldn't be surprised if there was infamous offsync stuff on there, at least in older mixes.



When you're going for such a difficult feat as PFC's your sense of timing really starts to notice the more nitpicky things like sync at certain spots (or in general). 1-2 frames is an incredibly tiny portion of time that you're allowed to get marvelous/perfects on.

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These examples aren't nearly as bad as KONAMIX, where literally every song drifts 1/4th of the way through. PFCs are damn near impossible. Songlist is great though.

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Off/sync isn't really that relevant in IIDX because the sounds come from the key presses. The leftover track is in 90% cases just the bassline so even if konami did lopsy job on syncinc that to the key track, it would be hard to notice.

There are a few cases where a song has Different timing windows, but they are specified in the song files so they are intentional.

Sync is very challenging to get right. Not only is it challenging to match a downbeat perfectly with the steps, but individual preference also plays a part, as well as environmental factors. So to answer your questions, yes, a lot of songs are offsync. They're different kinds of offsync though. Let's break some stuff down. Disclaimers: this is all in my personal experience, and when I say that things are "offsync" or "onsync", I'm not talking about misquantized notes (Captain Jack, Healing-D-Vision, etc.), just the "offset"/"drifty-ness" of the song.

Early era DDR (1st-4th+): A lot of songs here are just fucked. And by fucked, I mean that if you step completely on beat (at least in my experience), you're basically on the perfect/great cusp. Typically, songs are early if anything, but quite a number of songs drift. GOTCHA (Theme from Starsky & Hutch) is probably the worst culprit. It's one of the most challenging songs to PFC from that era.

5th: Bringing the main series into 60 frames per second was a big boost to the player experience, but that doesn't means songs became onsync. Sadly, Konami must have overcompensated or something, because now almost every song is late. PARANOiA Eternal is one of the exceptions, and pushes it as one of the hardest songs to PFC in 5th in addition to its challenging steps. As with 4th+, the offsync-ness is such that you're on the perfect/great window for a lot of songs.

6th-8th: The sync becomes a lot better here. Very rarely do you have any songs that are so bad that it's a major problem. A few songs are quite drifty (Highs Off U, Little Bitch, even LOM) to the point that it helps to memorize where they drift such that you PFC it. It's really not that bad though.

SuperNOVA: There are two cases here, pre-patch and post-patch. If you weren't around then, you may not know that SN1 had to be patched a couple months into its release because the sync was trash on a lot of songs. The patch didn't even fix a lot of the issues. Songs like RED ZONE, which were TERRIBLE, became moderately offsync. But a lot of the "offsync-ness" came as a result of a new engine which seemed a bit more strict for timing. I don't know how the engine affected the timing or by how much, but when SN came out, people in the community generally regarded SN PFCs as harder to get than their EXTREME counterparts.

SuperNOVA2: To be honest, I wasn't really around for SN2, so I can't speak too deeply into its nuances, but suffice it to say it shared the same engine as SN so a lot of stuff still applies. However, marvelouses were introduced into normal gameplay, which made a lot of syncing issues more apparent. For example, if a song was previous 1 frame early, you might not notice it in previous DDR iterations, but when that 1 frame is the difference between a perfect and a marvelous, you'll notice it very quickly. But generally sync is improving.

X: I'm just gonna ignore this piece of history.

X2-2014+: These games all use the same engine and in general have the same sort of generic problems that I described in my intro. Certain songs feel dead on, others feel a bit off, but in general nothing is /terrible/. London Evolved is moderately bad, as are some others. But when you do have marvelouses in normal gameplay, along with online updates, sync is a bit easier for Konami to get right. For example, Mermaid Girl was terrible when it came out in X3. People quickly noticed and complained, and Konami pushed an update to fix the sync.

So as a general rule, sync has gotten better over the years, and marvelous timing has allowed problems to surface more quickly. There have been and will always be offsync songs.


Now let's be clear here: those two things are not mutually exclusive. A song being offsync doesn't mean it's not PFC-able, or even MFC-able. I've MFC'd Happy Angel twice, and I maintain that it is every so slightly late. And the good players who can tell when songs are offsync are precisely the type of people that will be able to score better on songs, because they know when exactly to adjust their stepping and by how much. So in conclusion and to wrap around to how I started this rambling post, yes, a lot of songs are offsync. They vary in how offsync they are. When you reach the upper echelon of play where every perfect matters, you will start to notice these subtle differences more and more.

A Year Without Rain on DDRII may be the worst case of bad sync in DDR. It's just completely off the whole way through.

Actually, it's not the worst since most people who care about this wouldn't even play that song to begin with.

There are a quite a few songs that are offsync in various versions of DDR but some people like to exaggerate. Some that I can remember....

- Luv To Me AMD Mix on unpatched Supernova
- Max 300 Super-Max-Me-Mix on unpatched Supernova
- .59 on Supernova (could have just been the local machine at the time, but it seemed really off in the beginning and corrects itself later on)
- Electro Tuned on DDR Max US CS and Extreme AC
- sync on Extreme (heh, isn't that ironic)

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^At least your sync worked. I got the first version of DDR Extreme 2 and the game would not even load the song.
Let's not forget the notorious Hyper Eurobeat or more commonly called Hyper Offbeat.

I try not to think about Hyper Offbeat. I swear that friggin' song is more evil than Tsugaru .

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Wasn't Ska a go go off beat too on Extreme?

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Speaking of EXTREME, stoic went majorly off after the stop near the end.

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Wasn't This Is The World We Live In from Dancing Stage Max unplayable?

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That whole song.

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ska a go go is horrible. stoic went a 16th off after the stop which was fixed in X. Electro Tuned has that weird slowdown/speed up which was fixed in X as well.

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I will argue until the end of time that Unreal from SN2 is ridiculously off sync.

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How about Long Train Runnin' by X-Treme on DDR SN1 Arcade? I don't know if it was just me, but it seemed offsync to me.

And, I've been told iFutureList (also in SN1 Arcade) is offsync. Could someone here please confirm this?

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I found "Rescue Me" from DDR 2010 to be off-sync, which ruined the chart for me.

Protip: Konami, if you're going to cover/arrange/remix a song, don't use a chart that is too similar to that of the original song.

Everything on DDR Freedom. Everything. Except Emotions but the chart didn't do that Awesome Track(TM) justice.

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