Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party Hot

As if I wasn’t already having enough trouble trying to properly move my feet while playing the DDR games, along comes a new entry in the series that now requires me to also pay attention to what my hands are doing while I am playing.  With the inception of Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party for Nintendo Wii, no longer is it acceptable for me to flail my arms uncontrollably to and fro while I desperately try to control my center of gravity.  And worst of all, rather than using my arms to actually dance, I must instead issue a convulsive flick of the wrist each time the game asks me to.

Okay, so perhaps you DDR fans are in the market for something fresh after all these years of dancing to the same rules.  If that’s the case, you might find the premise behind Hottest Party intriguing; it puts the Wii-mote and nunchuk to use to involve your hands in addition to your feet, making precision with four appendages necessary for success.  But apart from that, it doesn’t add a whole lot to the aged formula… and the Wii-centric functionality really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, sadly.

Dance Dance on the Revolution

DDR’s first appearance on the Wii sees a complication of the traditional gameplay even as the rest of the experience is surprisingly thinned-out.  In Hottest Party, there are fewer modes of play than usual, as well as a much shorter song list—only fifty songs this time around—than has become standard for the series.  It also features no online functionality (hardly a surprise among Wii games, though the downloadable content is missed).  That’s sure to take a toll on its lasting appeal, and will no doubt disappoint DDR enthusiasts who are becoming increasingly accustomed to a wide selection of play modes and a song list pushing 70+ tracks.

But other changes have been made that compensate at least slightly for these deficiencies.  For one thing, the main game mode, Groove Circuit Mode (which is where all of the unlocking of hidden content takes place) is cleverly designed to have you replay songs from the existing list many times under the pressure of new criteria, a design that adds some artificial depth to the game.  Here, you’ll move from one venue to the next, working to meet specific objectives (“Clear nine songs with fewer than five Boos”, or “Clear four songs with a 30 or higher combo”, for instance), and battling the venue master in order to unlock more content and progress.  (These venue master battles aren’t nearly as interesting as they sound, by the way; they’re really just a fancy version of a “beat this score” challenge.)

You’ll also encounter step “gimmicks”, which are similar to those found in the relatively vapid DDR: Mario Mix for Nintendo GameCube.  These gimmicks appear at random and infect your otherwise ordinary step charts with all manner of chaotic variance.  For instance, Foot Confusers zip across the screen in unnatural patterns before coming to rest in a random column, while Foot Destructors lower your meter if accidentally stepped on.  These gimmicks can be fun when playing against a friend, but they come off as more of a distraction during regular single-player dancing.  Luckily, you can disable them from the Options menu.  Unluckily, you must do this each and every time you boot up your game, as your preferences are not saved.

The song list includes a considerably larger number of popular songs than in previous DDR games, which, according to your perspective, may or may not be a good thing.  For newcomers, it makes diving in and playing more immediately enriching, because you already know the song that you’re dancing to.  But DDR veterans will likely argue that the Konami original songs are equally—if not more—appealing than top-40 remixes.  Regardless of your personal stance, when you know the music well, the enjoyment factor of dancing to it is amplified (unless you’re like me, in which case no amount of familiarity with the music can render your violently random movements and chaotic gyrations meaningful).

Either way, here are a few of the more popular songs you can look forward to dancing to in Hottest Party:

·         99 Red Balloons

·         Clocks

·         Disco Inferno

·         Blue Monday

·         Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)

·         Hot Stuff

·         Lips of an Angel

·         Rhythm is a Dancer

·         The Sign

·         You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

Hottest Lukewarm Party

You may be wondering why I haven’t yet mentioned the Wii-specific hand-gesturing feature in this review.  In fact, this “feature” comes off as such an afterthought, it seems only fitting to relegate it to side-note status in my review.  These hand gestures are actually nothing more than new icons on the scrolling step chart that represent either your left or right hand—and rather than moving in some fashion that actually resembles dancing, the best and only remotely accurate way to respond to them is to flick your wrist quickly and awkwardly on the beat.  Worse yet, the timing still seems like it’s a little bit off.  Like the step gimmicks, these hand gestures can also be disabled from within in Options menu, after which they appear as regular steps.  But again, your preferences cannot be saved, so having to go through this process every time you boot up the game is annoying.  Overall, this “feature” is quite a letdown that feels more like a half-hearted exploitation of the Wii functionality than an actual value-added innovation.

Apart from that, the other play modes are lacking in comparison to previous DDR games, and in conjunction with the nearly 50% smaller song list, they make Hottest Party feel like more of a regression than anything else.  The Workout Mode seems as though it was tacked on during the final stages of development.  The Free Play mode offers a couple of new options, including a Sync Mode, where two players dance simultaneously and are awarded a joint score based on the worst rating of each step, and a Friendship Mode, which is simply the inverse of Sync Mode (the better of the two steps is counted in this case).  But aside from these tiny extras, Hottest Party doesn’t offer much once you look beyond the Groove Circuit and Free Play basic modes.

Dancing Around the Point

You might be asking yourself whether or not these inadequacies really break the experience.  In short, no; they do not.  In spite of the slapdash motion controls and shallow selection of game modes, DDR: Hottest Party still delivers on the level of basic DDR; so if you’re a DDR nut and you’re looking for your fix of more music to dance to, Hottest Party will provide.  Sure, there are 20 songs fewer than in recent games, but the 50 that are there are still fun to play.  The problem is that the game is a step backward from previous DDR titles in just about every sense—and because of that, it’s below average by definition.  Perhaps the next round of DDR games will put on a hotter party than this, because quite honestly, it won’t be hard to do so.