Dance Dance Revolution: Extreme

Dance Dance Revolution Extreme is a music video game by Konami and is the eighth release in the main Dance Dance Revolution series. It was released on December 25, 2002 for Japanese arcades and on October 9, 2003 for the Japanese PlayStation 2. Despite the game being released only in a single region, the overall popularity of DDR caused the arcade release to be exported or pirated and placed in game rooms worldwide. The arcade release contains one of the largest soundtracks of any DDR game featuring 240 songs from across the entire series up to DDR Extreme as well as music from other Bemani music titles. Konami issued an in-game thank you to the fans of Dance Dance Revolution and announced that they were starting the series over but did not go into details. This led people to believe that DDR Extreme might be the final DDR game released or that the series might be rebooted as with Beatmania and Beatmania IIDX. However the series continued on video game consoles and in 2006 Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova was released to the arcades worldwide.

Difficulty
Dance Dance Revolution Extreme uses two new difficulty levels in addition to Light, Standard and Heavy. Beginners mode, which has been in previous releases of Dance Dance Revolution under the name of Simple and is also featured in Dancing Stage EuroMix 2 as Beginner, is an easier setting than Light and represented by the color light blue. The background animations are replaced with an on-screen dancer that follows the actual step patterns of the song, cuing the player when and where to step with visual aid. Players will also be given a brief tutorial on how to play Dance Dance Revolution after selecting their first stage. By default, Beginner will automatically pass players on their first stage regardless of accuracy and subsequent stages will play to end of the song even if failed. Players can exit or enter Beginners mode anytime during stage selection.

The Challenge difficulty level is above Heavy, although the complexity of Challenge step patterns are not always more difficult. Challenge cannot be selected at the start of the game, instead players must enter the Challenge difficulty during stage selection and is represented by the color navy blue. Unlike the other difficulty levels, relatively few songs have a Challenge level. In contrast some songs contain only Challenge step patterns and highlighting them put players on the Challenge difficulty level automatically for those songs. In the arcade release of DDR Extreme there is no visual indication that a song has Challenge step patterns. In the PlayStation 2 release, icons representing each difficulty level including Beginner and Challenge light up when a highlighted song is playable on those levels. During normal gameplay Challenge uses the same rules as every other difficulty level.

Marvelous
In Nonstop and Challenge modes, a new step judgment is used called Marvelous. The judgment uses a stricter timing window than Perfect, representing very accurate steps made by players. Marvelous is displayed after each such step in white, and is not displayed during normal gameplay.

Soundtrack
The official soundtrack for Dance Dance Revolution Extreme was released on Toshiba EMI's Dancemania series of albums and contains two discs. The first disc contains a portion of the new music featured on the arcade and PlayStation 2 game along with the game's menu music and an uncut version of Graduation ~それぞれの明日~ performed by BeForU. The second disc is a nonstop megamix of the tracks from the first disc into a single uninterrupted performance. The nonstop megamix features the game's menu music and the in-game announcer mimicking the feel of playing the arcade game.