It almost feels criminal to rate this so low because DDR is the OG to bridge the gap between skeptics and gaming. A non-violent arcade game with popular music that promotes physical wellness - and it kicks ass??? It paved an entire genre from an influence/cultural standpoint and gave the american arcade scene that last 'oomph' it needed at a time when consoles and redemption arcades were driving them to obsoletion.

But I would not play DDR 1st mix - the JP version, specifically, - again if I could help it.

1st mix ain't even poorly-aged - divorced from the context of the later releases, it has twice as many tracks as the competing Parappa 1, few of the same timing/UI issues, and a wealth of modes and modifiers to mix things up. Its failures are purely in hindsight, being a weak and mostly meatless track selection in the grander pantheon.

There's only 11 songs here; I dislike the selection overall, but it the picks here feel 'right', From 1st to 8th mix, Konami's licenses are all taken from iDance and Toshiba Emi's Dancemania series, which has a consistent blend of disco, euro and pop. Bemani took great care in selecting tracks and artists that would become the 'face' of DDR and mirror the series' aesthetic. There's smile.dk's iconic Butterfly, pop culture classics That's The Way and Kung-Fu Fighting, and then Little Bitch sitting in the corner, being a little bit too fucked up for the party. I don't like all these songs, and I hardly pick them when playing newer mixes, but I couldn't imagine 1st entry having anything besides these, y'know? They're the good ol' good ol's.

Konami and Naoki Maeda's original songs Paranoia and Trip Machine - which would become the series' 'mascot' songs and get remixed into oblivion, - codify the two core principles to DDR's loop: Stamina and Technique. When you break down DDR to 4 arrows, it's embarrassingly simple, but the challenge comes from handling these inputs through your physical movement. Timing the notes, controlling your force to maintain stability and accuracy, alternating your legs and pivoting your body to reduce 'double-stepping', among many other lite techniques. Once you reach a certain level, the biggest hurdle in DDR is simply a matter of 'can I last long enough to finish this track before passing out?' You can enjoy DDR without the dancepad (that's how my family played it), but removing the physical component undermines the real feeling of being there, becoming the dance machine, and surviving the tempest.

Which leads into my dislikes of 1st Mix: Energy. Its song selection doesn't really match the 'intensity' of physical play. These tracks are corny with a capital C - charming, but lacking the impact or raw adrenaline that gets you going. Their tempos are slow, their rhythms are goofy, and their stepcharts are all too basic. At this point in time, DDR still doesn't know how it wants to be played as a rhythm game. Konami had no expectations for how audiences would 'engage' with DDR; we've all seen groups get on a machine and just jump around with no regard for the arrows. So most stepcharts are written to give the player breathing room for freestyling - and when things get intense, it's for crowd-pleasing moves like drills and spins. There's an entire scene of players from then and now who play DDR just for freestyle - and more power to them. It's just not what I look for in DDR.

The menus and overall game layout are fucked over because of this, too. We've all come to accept the 'put your quarters in and pick your songs' format of later rhythm games, but as of 1998, Konami's still thinking in terms of traditional level sequencing. As such, the game's song library is awkwardly split between a 'Normal' and 'Hard' menu, and not all songs are selectable. It's also their way of hiding the short songlist, since you gotta play multiple times to see everything.

In certain lights this is one of the best-aged first entries to a historically-foundational breakthrough series - but there's not a lot to find here if you're coming from the later mixes. Luckily, it's (mostly) uphill from here.

[Thoughts on DDR, US Version]

This was a respectable introduction for the DDR franchise stateside. I won't deny that in comparison to later DDR titles this is a skeletal game in terms of content, yet they've kept the 90s charm and original music that made it so popular in Japan. Compiling the best hits from the 1st to the 3rd Mix in Japan and borrowing the UI of 3rd Mix, you get a no-nonsense look into what this dance game craze was about. While I would have liked a bigger song list and unlockables as incentive for playing, I still had a good time back when it came out and even playing it now.

(review of the US version, because IGDB doesn't separate the JPN and US versions)

US DDR 1 is certainly something. By the time this game came out, the JPN crowd was about to get the home version of the fourth game, so I don't think they could have just started from game 1 and tried to catch up. Rather, they basically took the songs from 1-3 and just kinda mashed em together to make this. What surprises me though is that DDR Best Hits existed in Japan, which was their game that did exactly the same thing this game does, yet these two games have pretty different setlists. Maybe it was licensing or something? I do prefer the song choices of Best Hits over the choices made for this game, though realistically 3rd mix with disc changes would have gotten ya the most mileage out of home DDR by this point in time. For bringing home DDR to a brand new market though, you could have done much worse, and I can cut this game a bit more slack than I can for best hits because of that.

[Thoughts on DDR, JP Version]

This honestly threw me for a loop and made me appreciate just how far this series has gone in terms of perfecting the difficulty system and the UI of the game mode. The core of the game is much more primitive. The lack of color differentiation between arrows of different tempo, difficulties that use a range of unhelpful phrases, and hidden modes you need an online guide to find, you could tell there was a lack of uniformity or consistency to signify the player what they were getting into. The most praise I could give is the unique song wheel that would rotate out the songs played with newer tracks. Given there's only 11 songs to choose from, this gave it the illusion there was more to play. With that in consideration, the only reason one would play this is for the song "Strictly Business," which was quickly removed from the series due to licensing. I would say unless you're interested in the history of DDR or collect the home console titles, this is inessential.