Dance Dance Retrospective: The Spin-Offs

When a franchise reaches a certain level of popularity, like Dance Dance Revolution did in Japan at the turn of the millenium, its creators will expand on its popularity beyond the canon entries.  And you know what that means: spin-off games.  Fandom must work differently in Japan.  How else could you explain that there were so many DDR titles released within the span of only a couple of years?  (Seriously, it makes Guitar Hero look like Mega Man Legends in that regard.)  And yet despite only packing a dozen or two songs each, they sold most of them for 5,000 yen* a pop?  I've brought up the 2ndMIX Club Version games and the Solo games in previous entries, and I have let slip that even these games pioneered certain tweaks which would become commonplace in the core series.  So let's explore the rest of the... rest, and see if they have anything worthwhile to contribute.  Please bear in mind that very, very few of these were released outside of Japan and as such, I've never seen any of them in person.  I gathered much of my research on these topics from the website DDRer's Stomping Ground, so if you can read Japanese or have a translator handy, I invite you to read up for yourself.

*5000 JPY = 47.52 USD in Jan. 2000

Until 2008, the Dance Dance Revolution series was known by the name "Dancing Stage" in Europe.  I don’t know, maybe repeating the word "Dance" in the title was too Japanese.  But for some reason, Konami used the Dancing Stage name for a couple of small-name releases in Japan, too. Dancing Stage featuring Disney’s Rave is, as you might expect, a tie-in with Disney, and as such features arrangements of songs from their films and theme parks.  The game also features covers of other licenced songs as well, and not very good covers if I say so myself.  But it did include the "Dance Magic" mode, an extention of versus play where both players can "attack" their opponents with modifiers in the hopes of messing them up.  For 2006's SuperNOVA, this feature was brought into canon as Battle mode.  Oddly, Disney's Rave was one of the few spin-offs that got published in America, as Dance Dance Revolution Disney Mix (PlayStation, 2001).  It replaced some of the licenced songs with Konami originals from the core series, including the mighty "B4U", of all things, and added the Single Maniac difficulty missing in the original.

But say Disney isn’t your thing, maybe you need your licenced games to be a bit more… Japanese in flavour.  They’ve got you guys covered too, with the subsequent releases of  Dancing Stage featuring True Kiss Destination, in 1999, and Dancing Stage featuring Dreams Come True in 2000. Both games feature tracks from their respective J-pop bands, but with only about a dozen songs each, I’d just barely recommend them for fans only.  The same goes with Dance Dance Revolution Oha-Sta, which was a tie-in with the childrens' variety show Oha-Sta (short for "Ohayo Studio", or "Good-morning Studio").  DDR Oha-Sta is yet another game based on the 3rdMIX engine and boasts the standard Basic, Another, and Maniac levels, but as expected from its target demographic, the charts are easier than most of their core series peers.  Taking this concept further is Dance Dance Revolution Kids.  The songs here include TV and anime theme songs, including those from Pokemon and Digimon Adventure.  So, in case you've been dreaming of some sort of Pokemon/Digimon crossover, then sorry, this is the closest you're going to get.

By this point, nearly all the home DDR releases were made for the PlayStation. But that changed with the release of DDR GB for the Game Boy Color.  One wouldn’t think the Game Boy Color was a natural choice to serve as a home for DDR.  Think about it: the 8-bit sound processor is forced to beat the songs beyond recognition, and the traditional dance pad is not an option.  But apparently portable gaming is a bigger deal in Japan than I could've imagined, because somehow it caught on.  Japan got a total of five games for the DDR GB series, including ports of Disney's Rave and Oha-Sta.  And what's more, they even made a dedicated DDR controller that plugged into the GBC's headphone port.  For the longest time, the only other releases for Nintendo platforms were Dance Dance Revolution: Disney's Dancing Museum (Nintendo 64, 2001, Japan only), and Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix (Gamecube, 2005).

You may have noticed that many of these games were released around the turn of the millenium.  For better or worse, these habits died out around 2002, the year when games like Dance Dance Revolution Extreme and Beatmania the Final more or less swept away the old generation.  But the spinoff games never stopped, far from it.  There's the Ultramix and Universe series, which I've mentioned before, and licenced titles like DDR Disney Channel Edition and DDR High School Musical in America, and DDR Winx Club in Europe.  To think I've come this far and I haven't even made a passing reference to the Hottest Party series on Wii...  That's because it deserves its own entry, next time on Dance Dance Retrospective.

Game Review: Shantae

Shantae

• Publisher: Capcom 
• Developer: WayForward 
• Release: 
• Game Boy Color, 2 June 2002 
• Nintendo 3DS, 18 July 2013 
• Genre: 2D Action 
• Players: 1 
• Save: Battery, 3 files 
• Rarity/Cost: 
• Game Boy Color: Rare, US$150-300 
• 3DS: DLC, US$5

I cannot believe it, but this month marks ten years since the release of Shantae for the Game Boy Color. Its star character has become an unofficial mascot for its developer, WayForward Technologies, and the girl herself instantly became one of my teen-era sex symbols. So why didn't I pick up the game on day one? Welp, the best reason I can think of is a botched release: the game was first reviewed in the Februrary 2002 issue of Nintendo Power, but it didn't get released until June that same year, and by that time I had forgotten about the game (but not the girl ^_^). Failing to pick it up is one of my life's greatest failures, just behind not applying to the German Honors Society and not going to the Genesis reunion tour. I finally caught up with the game in early 2008, buying it cartridge-only for about US$40. And guess how much it's going for these days? A minimum of $150!! Yeah, I just broke you.

Not helping matters was the unusual amount of sex appeal for an otherwise kid-friendly title, which as you recall I fell victim to. While the level of violence was tame enough for an E rating in North America, picture this: all four named female characters (the hero Shantae, the villain Risky Boots, the falconer Skye, and the zombie Rottytops) wear outfits that bare their midriffs. To be fair, the Game Boy Color's screen doesn't show that much detail, and there's a balance between the characters' sexy-cute and adorable-cute appeals. Plus, I've read reports that the character was first conceived by a woman (Erin Bozon, future wife of the game's director, Matt Bozon). Besides, the most likely cause of Shantae's failure was because it was made for the Game Boy Color, a system which in 2002 was being phased out in favour of the Game Boy Advance. Heck, its final title would be released less than half a year later! (For the record, it was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I also happen to own.) So, I can understand Capcom for the lack of promotion. (And to think this was well before Capcom became public enemy No.1!)

Belly-dance moves trigger transformations.

I'm sorry, enough of my musings, let's get to the review. Our eponymous heroine is a half-genie, employed as the protector of Scuttle Town. In the first act, the town gets beseiged by the crew of lady pirate Risky Boots, who makes off with a steam engine. In order to make it work, she requires the spirits of Water, Earth, Metal, and Fire, so Shantae must acquire them from the four dungeons to keep them from her. Good luck with that... Shantae is at its core one of those Metroidvania-style platformers, where the game takes place in one large world but sections are blocked off until you acquire certain abilities. In the case of this game, these abilities include transformations such as a monkey (for climbing up walls), an elephant (for breaking rocks), and a harpy (for flying). Since our hero is a genie girl, these are triggered through belly-dances: press Select to toggle the dance mode, and perform moves with the Control Pad, A, or B. In practise, it works out like playing the Ocarina from some of the Legend of Zelda games, only demanding tighter timing.

Following the Metroidvania formula does lend itself to some problems, namely, backtracking. If you want to alleviate some of the frustration, you can collect baby Warp Squids and trade them to learn transport dances. Not helping matters is the zombie caravan town, which shows up in a different location in every day/night cycle. Speaking of which, enemies have double the defence during the nights, as if they weren't tough enough already during the day. You can even the odds by purchasing projectile items such as Fireballs, Pike Balls, Storm Puffs, or support items like like health potions or Double Mints, which temporarily let you deal double damage. Don't forget, you have to trigger them by pressing Up and B, like in the original Castlevania trilogy. So yeah, if this game wore a shirt, it'd show its classic-style difficulty on its sleeves. If that's too much for you to handle, I don't have anything to say to you. 

Enemies take double damage in the night.  Oh joy...

Which is a shame, because you'd be missing out on a wonderful universe. The animation is some of the best I've seen on any 8-bit platform; even Shantae's standing animation is quite bouncy (both in the chest and otherwise, nudge nudge). The environment designs utilise a vivid colour palette, and coming out only months after 9/11, it's a nice change of pace to see the brighter side of Arabian culture used as an inspiration. As such, it's easy to see from all this that Shantae was a labour of love, and it's a shame it didn't get the recognition it deserved. As such, it proved difficult for WayForward to generate a sequel. They've had several false starts through the rest of the decade, but come 2010 they finally managed to cut out the middleman and self-publish Shantae: Risky's Revenge as a DLC title for the Nintendo DSi, followed by an enhanced (and cheaper!) port for iOS devices the following year. (We've got a Shantae sequel, a Duke Nukem sequel, a Diablo sequel... you're running out of excuses, Capcom.) Even better, the original game has since been made available on the 3DS's Virtual Console shop for a paltry US$5. I am glad this has come to fruition, so that a new generation of gamers might be able to experience Shantae without breaking the bank, because it's worth playing -- it's just not worth spending three figures on.

Positives:
+ Lots of items and transformations to play around with.
+ Fun setting and characters.
+ Wondrous animation and soundtrack.

Negatives:
- Some enemies take a lot of hits, especially during the nights.
- Large areas make for painful backtracking.
- Physical copies of this game are prohibitively expensive.

Control: 4 transformations out of 5
Design: 4 transformations out of 5
Graphics: 5 transformations out of 5
Sound: 4 transformations out of 5
Value: 4 transformations out of 5
The Call: 90% (A-)