Oha Suta Dance Dance Revolution

Transcription

Oh, Dance Dance Revolution. For a while, you were the world to me. There was a certain sport, a certain excitement, to digging up all these obscure cross-promotional licensed DDR games that were all over Japan back in the day. Fortunately, I’ve asked my good friend and curatoress of all things DDR, Rebecca in Pittsburgh, to open the vault and share with us some of the more absurd, more primitave, and lesser-known entries in the Bemani opus. To this end, she’s provided me with Oha Suta Dance Dance Revolution, a special edition produced in collaboration with a morning kids’ show. That apparently features a technicolor chest of drawers with a head? That launches out of a swimming pool. Look, Japan’s tough enough to understand as it stands, but tack some cheesy edutainment programming on there and you’ve got a REAL winner. The mechanics are the same DDR that you’ve come to know, love, and avoid in arcades because you could never get deeper than Butterfly and want to spare yourself the shame. Anyway. The tracklist consists of eight tracks produced by the TV show itself, three DDR standards that served to introduce folks to the wider world out there that isn’t spawned from a morning kids’ show, and the debut of Cutie Chaser, AKA that creepy thing in ¾ time with the dog police girl that showed up on DDR Konamix here in the states against everyone’s better judgement. And… that’s it. That’s all of it. 12 songs. There are twelve songs on this game, which means the time to complete absolutely everything is… let’s see, 1.5 minutes average per song, buffer in some time for opening menus and closing credits… 30 minutes at the outside. Fortunately, though, there’s some replay tacked on in the form of collectable cards, which you get to pick from a lineup using the stars you earn in the main game mode. I kinda wanna take back that “fortunately” because it means you’ll be playing and replaying and replaying and replaying the same songs just to drum up enough stars to unlock the set, if you’re of a mind to unlock a set of non-tradable trading cards from a Japanese morning kids’ show. Hey, at least it’s old-DDR that still has the people dancing in the background, a feature that’s gone by the wayside in more recent releases. And you’ve still got the crazy backgrounds that make any spectators on recreational chemicals completely lose their marbles. Which is dangerous when folks are playing DDR. Someone could sprain an ankle or something. But, hey. Aside from Cutie Chaser being an abomination, the actual tracks on the disc are pretty catchy. Oha Ska and the Zona songs - which are apparently the themes of the antagonists of the show - are the real heavy-hitters, keeping the action high and the beats driving. The addition of Brilliant 2U is a nice touch, a good techno DDR standard that’s a bit challenging without being, y’know, PARANOiA, but the other two imports from the mainstream canon - Make A Jam! and Keep on Movin’ - can take a powder. But hey, at least they’re actual tracks, and not blippy interpretations of those tracks, as would be rendered on a handheld device! Right, guys? Guys?