Cheat sheet

First stage (Preface)

In 2022 I decided to get good at DanceDanceRevolution.

I had some experience with it from owning a console spinoff with songs from the Mario series in my preteens. These came with ‘dance pads’ replicating the ←↓↑→ foot sensors of the arcade cabinets, but I could only beat the harder levels using control sticks.

Being a spinoff I didn’t even get to internalise DDR’s music, which branched from the Eurodance trend of the late 90s into hardcore and techno. I wound up learning more from the YouTube videos I watched in my teens, which remixed rhythm game songs like ‘Red Zone’, ‘Sync’ and ‘Flower’.

On the occasions my friends would go to the few arcades with DDR, I’d make someone play with me and always do the same thing. I’d pick songs I recognised from YouTube, overestimate my ability and play their ‘Difficult’ charts (from a range of Beginner, Basic, Difficult, Expert and Challenge).

I sucked, but it was more fun because Difficult charts better reflected the rhythms of the songs that I enjoyed. (To be considered easier, Beginner and Basic charts would often just be less in time with the music.)

For context, DDR’s difficulty system meant Difficult charts sat within a range of numeric ratings, with harder Basic charts overlapping with that band too. So there would’ve been songs with Basic or Difficult chart ratings that matched my skill without being oversimplified, but I wasn’t interested in finding them.

Sucking also mattered less in multiplayer because both people continued as long as someone passed (and my partner would more reasonably choose Beginner or Basic). I’d need to be realistic if I ever played solo, which finally happened once one of my local bars in 2021 opened an arcade section.

In my experience, ‘retro’ arcade game series are uncommon, and when bars get them they prioritise shooters or fighters like Time Crisis or Street Fighter. This one was novel for having both these and DDR, but now DDR wasn’t the only retro series, my friends inherently played it less.

Come 2022 I was also coping with return-to-work politics at a time when the city felt unsafe to idle in. Stopping past my local would make travelling home from the office less linear, without suffering the CBD crowds to visit one of the mainstream arcades.

So the decision was made!

Second stage (Getting started)

The first important detail is that this arcade had an older instalment of DDR from 2007, subtitled SuperNOVA2. These older versions had sorting methods like by title and difficulty rating, but they weren’t telegraphed, like how many retro arcade games had socialised knowledge.

By default the songs were sorted by the 30+ newly added to SuperNOVA2, the 100+ from SuperNOVA, and a 150+ folder of older instalments. Incidentally this helped since the hardest new songs were unlock-only, so I tried the hardest SN2 Basic chart (‘Trim’), rated 5/10, and it went okay.

But while I thought I could try the easiest SN2 Difficult chart next, ‘Silver Platform - I Wanna Get Your Heart -’ (4/10), I quickly failed it. This misconception was influenced by two interrelated details about the series in the late 2000s.

1) SN2 was the last game to rate songs out of 10, with subsequent instalments changing the maximum to 20. And 2) the reason the scale changed to 1–20 is because the series had a massive difficulty creep that the existing scale couldn’t represent.

To justify the new hardest song in each instalment being the latest 10/10, the other unlock-only Expert charts (which should’ve also been 10s) were underrated. Their Difficult charts realistically verged on 9–10/10 too, so the underrating rippled backwards as far as the easiest new Difficult, but not Basic.

Playing the handful of sub-5 Difficults in the pre-SN2 folders circumvented this difficulty creep enough for me to practice and seriously reattempt ‘Silver Platform’. But for 5/10, being the majority of Difficult songs, the SN2 folder was too broad a filter when their re-ratings could be anywhere from 6–9/20.

At this stage I had to look up the re-ratings to get a sense of what order to tackle them in. There weren’t many songs in each group of 6–9/20, so I looked up the pre-SN2 songs’ re-ratings and incorporated them wherever I needed more practice.

But skimming the ratings suited my goal, which was to focus on passing, not score, until I reached the few songs I recognised in SN2. ‘Red Zone’ and ‘Sync’ were Difficult 6 re-rated 8 and 7 re-rated 8 respectively, making 8/20 my first target (with ‘Trim’ Basic being re-rated 6/20).

Final stage (Setbacks)

I haven’t yet gone into the level of play required to get this far, and for good reason: I still sucked. My overfamiliarity with the target songs meant I had a sense of their rhythms, but I hadn’t learned how to step out their patterns efficiently.

This is less relevant to lower difficulties, because you often have enough time between arrows to use whatever foot you want for the next one. But at faster speeds, a step pattern really does imply what foot you should use for each arrow, like a genuine dance chart.

The simplest example is the three-step ‘crossover’ pattern, which could be ←↓→ in quick succession for instance. After stepping ← with your left foot and ↓ with your right, → is easiest to step with your left foot!

More generally, arrows should be stepped by alternating each foot, but this requires anticipating which foot to start a pattern with. ↑↓← should be started with your left foot so you end with it on ←, but knowing this means reading several steps ahead.

Conversely, every misstep puts you in a worse position to start the next pattern from. Starting ↑↓← with your right foot is recoverable by double-stepping ↓← with your left, but would make an ensuing ↑→ jump more awkward for example.

Without understanding any of this, I overly leaned on the support bar to carry my weight while I jerked towards arrows as I saw them. I didn’t learn timing either, because if I jumped too early I could hold onto the bar more to delay my landing on the pads.

So yes, I could pass ‘Red Zone’, but not without over-exerting myself, leaping all over the place unnecessarily. Even if I abided this, there was a hard limit on playing 9–10/20 charts inefficiently because it’s where the majority of charts become Experts.

Difficult charts can do streams of arrows in short bursts, but in Expert they get longer, increasing the risk of misstep and cost of recovery. So while I could brute force some 9–10/20 Difficult charts (eg ‘Paranoia’), I needed more than to read the next arrow and step it quickly.

Extra stage (Getting good)

Fixing my chart literacy issue required a three-pronged approach of playing for score, not skimming the difficulty rating groups and not using the support bar. I’m not one for practising full combos (ie no misses), but getting an A over a B–C inherently means reading ahead and minimising missteps.

Delving beyond the SN2 folder would help find songs with patterns that I needed to practice. Some had more crossovers (eg ‘Air’), some had more jumps (eg ‘Dance Dance Revolution’), while the fastest Difficults emulated the slower but stream-heavy Experts.

Playing barless made anticipating patterns more important, since without shifting my weight, getting into position for a crossover became pivotal to completing the pattern. Amid this, it was still important to set target songs to pass, because it took a while to get results from grinding for A-ranks.

By this point I had catalogued the re-ratings for all Difficult charts and sorted them by BPM, the logical conclusion of my grouping (see Appendix). So in each group I identified milestones, usually the fastest song, a former boss song, or just an infamous one, and worked towards them.

C-ranks would be marked for replay to get them up to a B, and A-ranks would retroactively ‘clear’ groups of a lower difficulty and BPM. For example, A-ranking ‘A’ (8/20, BPM 191) would forego me needing to practice any Difficult 7/20 song except ‘Healing Vision’ (BPM 196).

The final complication is that around 50 songs in SN2’s song library were cut from future instalments, so they never received ‘proper’ re-ratings. They’re re-rated in the ‘location test’ of the sequel, DanceDanceRevolution X, but their tentativeness means a test 7/20 isn’t guaranteed to be an actual 7/20.

Original ratings only helped for subdividing re-ratings, but passing the hardest re-rated 5/10 at least meant I could safely play any cut song rated 5/10. Playing cut Expert 5–6/10s also helped with broaching the Expert 7/10 cluster, as it’s the median of Expert in the same way Difficult 5/10 was.

Come 2023 I’ve re-cleared ‘Paranoia’ Difficult 7→9 barless, with ‘Love Shine’ Expert 7→9, ‘Trip Machine ~Luv Mix~’ Difficult 7→10 and ‘Cutie Chaser’ Expert 7→10 next. These are the hardest songs I brute forced in 2022, so passing them without being such a tryhard is my benchmark for getting good.

Encore extra stage (Reflection)

My approach is of course idiosyncratic because I’ve applied modern DDR practices to a decades-old instalment. So I’ll cover the affordances that modern cabinets offer and what areas can still only be covered by independent research.

First, e-amusement passes: this is an additional swipe card compatible with modern cabinets that saves scores, among other features like not game-overing on a fail. Second, modern cabinets have over 800 songs, which hopefully means there’s more easy Difficults/Experts to help broach their respective medians.

Third, the new rating system is built in! I’d have always stumbled before determining my initial skill level to be 6/20, but having a 6/20 folder would’ve meant a lot less manual categorisation.

Still though, with the Difficult median assumedly comprising more songs than ever too, you’ll always be grouping it somehow to feel like you’re progressing. Using modern songs I knew could’ve broached ‘Red Zone’ via ‘SigSig’ Basic 6/20, ‘Flower’ Basic 7/20 and ‘Smooooch’ Difficult 7/20 – but that’s only 3 charts!

Lastly modern DDR isn’t the be-all and end-all of song selection. All my ‘familiar’ songs crossed over from other Konami rhythm games, and the composer (Naoki Maeda) who wrote most ‘important’ songs departed in 2013.

Other artists have emerged since, but you could easily miss a song or prefer to try its original game series in the case of ‘crossovers’. Even licensed pop songs have developed a reciprocal relationship with the series, with some lamenting the absence of Eurodance songs from Smile.dk and Captain Jack.

While old arcade instalments are uncommon, PC copycats with both chart recreations and original music like StepMania exist if you have your own dance pad. As for me, this reflection might look a lot different if I didn’t write it while living in a second storey apartment.

But since I do, my journey to get good has turned into a systematic exhaustion of DanceDanceRevolution SuperNOVA2. It’s more cautious without e-amusement, but it hinges on a community with encyclopedic chart data – who parsed the difficulty creep by socialising this knowledge originally!

Appendix: Difficult non-licensed songs in SN2* given re-ratings in DDRX**

* Excludes SN1–2 bosses and songs added to cabinets post-release

** Modern re-ratings represented as "→#" in Lvl column