Did the Revolution finally get a revolutionary game?

The revolution has finally arrived on the Nintendo Wii, with new motion controls, and plenty of arrows ready to spear any careless gamer, but just how HOT is this party? Let’s hit the dance floor, literally!

Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party is an interactive dancing video game. If you’ve never played Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) before, here’s how the game works: There are four stationary arrows (Left, Down, Right, and Up) at the top of the screen, that’s the step zone, now as soon as the song starts to play, arrows begin to scroll up toward the step zone. You must try to hit each arrow when it is perfectly in the step zone of the specific arrow. If you do well, you’ll score a “Marvelous”, “Perfect” or “Great”. If you slightly miss it, you’ll score a “Good”. If your way off, you score a “Boo” There are also arrows called “Freeze Arrows”. When a “Freeze Arrow” appears, you must hold on that arrow until it completely disappears. If you hold the “Freeze Arrow” until the end, you’ll score an “OK”, but if you fail to hold the “Freeze Arrow” until the end, you’ll get an “NG” (No Good). As you dance, your dance gauge (located directly above the step zone) will either increase or decrease depending on your arrow scores. If your dance gauge runs out, you will fail.

DDR: Hottest Party features two other DDR elements, Gimmicks and a Wii Exclusive, Hand Markers. Gimmicks can vary, depending on mode played, but include: spikes and double-Impact arrows. Spikes are bad! If you step on a spike, your dance gauge will take a significant hit, in the wrong direction. Double Impact arrows require the player to hit arrow twice in a very quick fashion. The Gimmicks definitely add an extra level of challenge. The Hand Markers require you to swing your Wii-mote and the Nunchuk when they appear on-screen. To be honest, the Hand Markers are dumb and pointless! . Thankfully, if you decide that you don’t like the Gimmicks or Hand Markers, you can turn them off.


DDR Hottest Party features 3 main modes and 5 gameplay styles. There’s Groove Circuit mode, Free Play mode, and Workout mode. In Groove Circuit mode you travel from venue to venue in an effort to reignite the fire within the hearts of your audience by dancing to the beat. Each venue has three requests you must clear in order to advance to a new venue. First there’s the audience request, then there’s the dance request, and finally there’s the battle request. In the audience request and dance request, you must clear a specific dancing requirement, such as clear 3 songs, or score a AA on three songs on the expert level, etc. The battle request is sort of like a boss battle. You must out dance your opponent, the venue master, in order to finally reignite the fire within the hearts of your audience. If you succeed in winning the battle request, you will be allowed to proceed to the next venue. As you clear venues, you will unlock new songs and dance stages for Free Play mode. In all, there are a total of 9 venues to dance through. Not to spoil anything, but DDR veterans are in for a real treat when they reach the final ninth venue. You can play Groove Circuit mode with four different styles; either Single (1 player), Friendship (2-4 players, where the highest judgment score is awarded to all players), Multi (2-4 players), or Sync (2-4 players, where the lowest judgment score is awarded to all players; however a score of “Boo” or “NG” will fail the game.)

In Free play mode you get to choose your desired song, difficulty level, and dance stage. You can also choose one of five styles to play in, including Single, Friendship, Multi, Sync and Battle (1-2 players, in 1 player battle you compete against the computer and in 2 players battle you can face off against another player). In Workout mode, you can add fitness goals and count burned calories.

DDR Hottest Party’s graphics are very good. The character models are very detailed and the arrows are nicely polished and shiny. The graphics are surprising smooth and not blocky whatsoever. The Dance stages/venues feature a lot of nice background motions/patterns, such as gears turning or neon lights flashing to the beat. DDR Hottest Party even features back-up dancers which really is a nice touch. Konami definitely put a lot polish on this DDR. The game overall controls very well when it comes to dancing on a dance pad, but the hand markers are poor. The game failed to register the hand marker motions on many occasions. The soundtrack has a few groundbreaking songs such as “Always (Microbots Trance Dance Mix)”, “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”, “Confession” and a few others, but many are just OK or not that good at all. It’s kind of disappointing really, because the arrow steps are done very well and it would be nice to have some better tracks to dance to, but oh well. The game features very nice voice acting and the sounds are standard DDR-fare, taken from previous DDR games I suspect.

I’m also disappointed to see that this version of DDR lacks any online modes, especially now that it seems the Nintendo Wi-Fi is starting to finally kick-off. Also, where’s the Mii character support? It would have been really cool to be able to dance with your Mii characters but Konami didn’t include that!

I really do enjoy Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party a lot, but it just feels inferior somewhat to previous versions of DDR. I do recommend buying Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party, but it just could have been so much more.