The songlist is better than the original's, there's more old licenses that used to be in DDR, they managed to get the old Adult Swim theme (D-Code), there's a new arrow type that added some more variety to the charts, and the boss songs are as tough and unique from the boss songs that were in pre-SuperNOVA DDR as ever. It was a pretty solid sequel, and I would have given it a 4. But...does anyone play the officials?

After this game was released, Konami v. Roxor ended up getting settled: Roxor could no longer make In The Groove, In The Groove machines, upgrade kit or dedicated, could no longer be made, and Konami would own the rights to the ITG name specifically so In The Groove 3 can never happen. However, there was one thing Roxor was allowed to do: make revisions to the machines that were already available. The update they ended up doing post-lawsuit, R21, allowed people to play their own Stepmania files from a USB as long as they weren't more than 2 minutes long (they would release another revision, R23, to make sure of that). The world would never be the same.

So yeah, it's Stepmania with all of the fanmade content the machine could read from a USB stick on an actual DDR cabinet! Meme songs, songs that would have been in ITG3, your songs, my songs, even songs from DDR, anything goes! If your arcade had the amazing Andamiro-made ITG2 cabinet, that was even better. If I had one closer to me, I would have played this a lot.

I have every reason to believe this would have never happened if Konami didn't sue ITG out of existence, as none of the spiritual sequels have custom song support. It did leave one to wonder what an In The Groove 3, 4, or 5 would have been like, but now we have StepmaniaX, and that's a good enough answer.