Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2 Review

Like We Always Remembered

At its core, Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2 is the same game we all know and love. Choose from 5 levels of difficulties (Beginner, Light, Standard, Heavy, and—on certain songs--Challenge), then pick your song and go! Follow a set pattern of arrows in time to the music and hit the dance pad arrows when the scrolling arrows enter the Step Zone.

Depending on your timing, you can get a grade of Perfect, Great, Good, Bad, or Boo. After each song, you’re scored based on your dancing. You can get AAA (scoring all Perfects); or AA (Getting mostly Perfects with some Greats; an A through E (scoring a combination of Perfects, Greats, Goods, Bads, or Boos). Obviously Boo is not what you strive for because the letter grade E does not mean ‘Excellent’. You are also given a number score, in which the highest score for that song and each difficulty is recorded so you can strive to do better.

The number score is also helpful if you are playing against somebody and you get the same letter grade and have to go on something else. There’s nothing like gloating over a 200 point difference when playing Heavy mode with Sakura. Okay, only Dance Dance Revolution veterans (and geeks) will get that joke.

Your Mission, If You Choose to Accept It

New to the game is Dance Master Mode. This mode is similar to the Mission Mode from the first Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, only much better. You travel around a ‘dance world’ playing various missions with certain goals in order to unlock other missions, songs, characters, costumes, hints to hidden arrows, and other information. You earn points which you spend in the Shop, which houses all the songs, characters, etc. Does this sound familiar? It should since it plays similar to Edge Master mode from Soul Calibur.

You start off playing Beginner and Light songs with simple goals, but as you unlock different areas of the board, you soon find yourself with harder goals, like never hitting the down arrow in a song. Or attaining 7,000,000 points, when the highest you could get is 7,001,000—that means you have to be near perfect. I got real comfortable passing about 50 missions before I failed one. After that, my confidence level went down because the difficulty level went up... and up... and up...

The rest of the song list is slowly unlocked and purchasable as well as character costumes. You can even buy different shaped arrows, like butterflies or flaming arrows. Personally, they are hard to read, but add a touch of flavor to the game. There are also opportunity to find out about Hidden Arrows in the missions. That’s right, if you truly want to do everything, you will have to replay some missions to find invisible arrows to hit. The hint will tell you what mission and where it is in the sequence and you just have to figure out where it is.

Dance Master Mode is a huge step from Mission Mode and a welcomed change so that Dance Dance Revolution doesn’t get boring.

Music Makes the People...

There are over 70 songs in Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2, which includes some of the best licensed songs to date. When you first boot up the game, 30 songs (most of them the licensed) are selectable. The rest must be unlocked and purchased through Dance Master Mode.

There are remixes of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the song “I Will Survive” as well as the original songs “Play that Funky Music” and “Look At Us” by Sarina Paris. Don’t worry, there is a nice mix of Techno, Rock, Dance Pop, and Hip Hop to dance to so you should find something to your liking if you’ve never played a DDR. For veterans of Dance Dance Revolution, there are some of you old favorites as well as remixes of some of the good songs of previous Dance Dance Revolution games.

And the Rest

The old standard modes are still here. Workout Mode lets you set your weight, a time or calorie goal, and song type in order to just exercise aerobic style. Training Mode helps you work on tough songs by allowing you to dance to a certain moment in the song or slowing the song down. Lesson Mode gets you started on the basics of Dance Dance Revolution with arrow basics and advanced dancing to improve your skills.

Konami has included a Karaoke Party Demo. In the demo, you can either sing a song or you can sing AND dance. You have two songs to choose from: “Play That Funky Music” and “Crazy In Love”. After selecting your dance difficulty (easy, hard, expert), you are well on your way to embarrassing yourself. I can sing fairly well and dance very well, but I tried both on this demo and...(coughs)... I barely made it past the first verse.

Thompson’s Two Cents

Fans of Dance Dance Revolution will love Extreme 2 like they have loved past DDR games. If you’re new to Dance Dance Revolution, you would do well to start off with this one. With a nice selection of licensed songs and an exciting Dance Master Mode, Konami has regained the crown in the dancing genre.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some more “Oops... I did it again” to boogey down to.