The Dance Dance Revolution world championships are next weekend, hosted in Japan by KONAMI. This weekend, at the qualifiers, dancers from across the globe are burning through calories like it’s the end of Footloose.
I had a friend who was really good at Dance Dance Revolution. I couldn’t compete with her. My technique, polished through many hours of not playing Dance Dance Revolution, was to basically mash the mat with my feet. I hit the right button about 50 percent of the time, and it looked less like dancing and more like I had a scorpion in my pants.
But it turns out that pro Dance Dance Revolution strats look a lot like my old technique. They probably know what they’re doing, but when their feet blur together into one big string of foot inputs, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.
The two dancers in the photo, UN-LIM and O4MA., were dancing the final song of the East Japan qualifiers: ‘PARANOiA Revolution’, an almost 2-minute-long song by CLIMAX OF MAXX 360. It begins at a terrifying 180 BPM, which is faster than the recomme and goes all the way up to 360 BPM, according to the wiki page.
“This song is a level 19,” says Reddit user u/nazmo74 on a post discussing the qualifiers. “For a sense of scale, there are 809 songs in the game, and only five of them are level 19s.”
The tense duel between UN-LIM and O4MA ended with a tiny 10-point difference between the two. O4MA, despite a last-minute fumble, managed to come away with the win.