Game Series Review: Konami Dancing Stage

As a disclaimer before I begin this series review, I use the Dancing Stage series as a sort of musical rhythm game, with a controller as opposed to a dance mat. Mainly because I want to avoid making a fool of myself, but also because its surprisingly fun. The games are pretty similar save for the music on them, so the reviews will be fairly brief and I'll use some supplementary scoring categories to separate them. Also I'll be playing most of the songs on expert or difficult difficulty, so any comments on the moves will be relevant to those difficulties only.

Game: Dancing Stage Euromix
Console: Sony Playstation
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 16th February 2001

In Euromix, the oldest version I am in possession of a copy of, the songs seem to be of average quality although that's pretty subjective. The inclusion of a Christmas song however, (incidentally named Silent Hill, very festive) is rather a strange one. The visuals behind stages are decent but a reminder that you're playing an original Playstation game, there are a lot of good routines which go well with their songs and are fun to play, and not too many that are impossible or don't fit.

Overall the difficulty is fairly standard, the expert stages are challenging most of the time, and the standard and beginner stages are fairly simple, although for faster songs they do become a little bit of a challenge. The only complaint difficulty wise would be the names of difficulties change from song to song, with titles like "Superior" and "Genuine" which I assume had been roughly translated over from Japanese. My only other complaint of this version is the announcer who cuts into songs a lot to tell you useless, sometimes even incorrect information. Music games benefit from not having someone speaking over the top of them all the time.

Pop Song Selection: 5.5/10
Konami Song Selection: 6.2/10
Visuals: 7/10
Gameplay: 8.6/10
Difficulty: 7.3/10

Rating: 67/100
Grade: C

Game: Dancing Stage Party Mix
Console: Sony Playstation
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 15th November 2002

A couple of games after Euromix came the Party Edition, with 51 songs in total, it boasted a much bigger library of music, although it had a smaller variety of pop songs, and more Konami originals. The pop selection that is on the game, however is of a high quality and enjoyable. The songs are arranged oddly ingame, and the player has to choose from a collection of songs instead of all songs, for their turn. The difficulty of steps in game is also odd, the standard steps and all steps on the pop songs are fairly easy, but the harder steps on the konami originals, which sometimes border on too hard.

Nice additions to the game are a 6 panel mode, where you can use a 6 panel dancemat, or the R1/L1 buttons on your controller. This adds some more challenge to the game, although for players used to playing with 4 arrows on a controller, it is almost too confusing to grasp at first. The announcer seems to butt into songs less than in the previous installment, so it seems that Konami took that into account when making this follow-up.

The grading on the game is also rather odd, where previously a good performance would get you an A, or an AA if it was almost flawless, most performances seem to attain a B, very rarely wavering eitherway into better or worse grades. This is somewhat disheartening as a player as there's no feeling that you're doing well or improving at the game. The visuals are decent although with the dancers behind, it feels like there was less effort made on the actual backgrounds compared to the first installment. 

A lot of the songs on this version have to be unlocked, this is done by passing 5 stages, on any difficulty. A total of 90 stages passed will unlock every song in the game. Although this is good compared to EuroMix's 1 unlockable song, 18 unlockables seems a little over the top. On the whole, this game has a fair few good ideas, for the series as a whole. The music is generally decent, but the routines and grading let it down in my view.

Pop Song Selection: 7/10
Konami Song Selection: 6/10
Visuals: 6.4/10
Gameplay: 7.1/10
Difficulty: 5.8/10

Rating: 64/100
Grade: C

Game: Dancing Stage MegaMix
Console: Sony Playstation 2
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 30th May 2003

Dancing Stage MegaMix was the first of the series to be on the PS2, something which seemed to help it immensely in its quality. The visuals behind the songs are good, detailed and more varied than ever before, the gameplay is smoother and the steps seem to fit the routines better than any previous installment. The song selection on the game is also very good featuring a number of decent pop songs as well as a lot of remixes of Konami songs from other games, most of which seem to be their best versions.

Megamix only has one unlockable song, but with 32 others to choose from, its not short of music and there's a lot of different types of song also. The difficulty of the routines seems fair, a beginner mode added in this installment for really basic steps, all the way up to expert which most of the time lives up to its name. "AAA" rankings are achieved for absolutely perfect scores with every step perfect (I have 2), and AA and A rankings are common for good performances. Overall this is a very good installment, improving on a lot of things from the original Playstation games.

Pop Song Selection: 8.5/10
Konami Song Selection: 8/10
Visuals: 7.2/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Difficulty: 8.7/10

Rating: 74/100
Grade: B

Game: Dancing Stage Fever
Console: Sony Playstation 2
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 24th October 2003

Very similar in visual and menu style to Dancing Stage MegaMix, Fever was released just 5 months after it. The selection of pop songs on it is arguably better than its predecessor, but it suffers from a poor selection of Konami originals and some routines which feel more lazily programmed than Megamix. One redeeming feature however is that the unlockable max bpm stage has almost playable moves compared to Max300 from Megamix.

Some of the visuals have been recycled from MegaMix, although a nice new feature of Fever is that some of the pop songs have their music videos behind the dance moves. Not only does this provide a better backdrop for the moves, but its something that couldn't have been done on the original Playstation version.

Pop Song Selection: 9/10
Konami Song Selection: 5/10
Visuals: 6.9/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Difficulty: 6/10

Rating: 69/100
Grade: C

Game: Dancing Stage Fusion
Console: Sony Playstation 2
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 5th November 2004

And so to the final installment of this series that I own. Dancing Stage Fusion has a markedly different visual style, menu-wise to MegaMix and Fever, a lot of things are in different places, and there are a lot more songs than any of the previous installments. That's not all for changes; this game also includes minigames, a revised scoring system, heaps of unlocks and the choice to have a dancer behind your arrows in game, or not.

On the face of it these changes seem for the best, however, a new rather unbalanced difficulty is created from the new scoring system, in Expert mode, you only have to miss 3 or 4 of the horribly complex moves in a sequence to be thrown out of your game. It seems like the game doesn't appreciate how much harder the Expert moves are in this game, compared to other installments. Standard and Difficult modes however seem easier than before and more forgiving, miss-wise, rending a massive difficulty gap between the 3 main choices.

The unlocks are also a double edged sword, there's nothing to tell you how to, or why you have unlocked a particular song, and so trying to do so is reduced to guesswork, and this is frustrating in a game with so many unlockable songs. A lot of the backgrounds for pop songs again have the music videos for the song, which is a nice touch, however on the whole this game seems disappointment for what it could have been.

Pop Song Selection: 8.2/10
Konami Song Selection: 6.6/10
Visuals: 8.2/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Difficulty: 4/10

Rating: 60/100
Grade: D

In summary, the Konami Dancing Stage series is hard to rate overall as a set of videogames, some may not even class them as "proper" video games, but I'd lump them into the arcade games section, if anything. At least in this category, they're with other games where high scoring is the aim. Perhaps also these games are better played with company than without, due to their competitive nature. As a series the only real differences are musical (save for the odd bad routine/grading mechanic), and so which is installment is best is more subjective than most games. Still Konami manages to bring the series together in its own style, and it can be enjoyable at times, especially with the right movesets and level of challenge.