Lots and lots of people have been getting really angry online over games being censored, having a little bit of cut content, or not using a direct translation, I’m not going to get into a discussion on that, but I’m about to tell you all about a game that was literally cut in half in the American release:

That’s right DDR EXTREME for the PS2.

You probably weren’t expecting a rhythm game to be the topic of this post, after all they’re simple games and usually any changes are because of licensing or language, but not in this case.

You see, in the original Japanese port, DDR Extreme had 111 songs, all of which were Konami originals, it was essentially an arcade perfect port with plenty of bonus content (such as a brand new boss song called “Max. (Period)”). At the time having 100+ songs in any game was unheard of, and fans were looking forward to it coming stateside.

But when it finally did…oh, boy…

Instead of just translating the menus and calling it a day, Konami got greedy, and cut 50 tracks from the game entirely, and swapped several of the remaining songs with licensed pop music, and for whatever reason changed everything to look like the previous game DDR Party Collection (with less extra content that that game had). The remaining disc space was used for the stupidest thing possible: Eye-toy minigames.

(Look at that man, he’s dead inside.)

Now Just giving us a vastly inferior version of the game would’ve been bad enough, but they went a step beyond. Wondering what they did with all the cut music? What else, they put it all in a another game.

This right here is the USA exclusive DDR EXTREME 2, one of the most shameless cash grabs ever. Aside from the few licensed pop songs, this game contains ZERO new songs that weren’t already in the Japanese version of DDR Extreme. Basically, if you weren’t lucky enough to have a Japanese PlayStation 2 you had to buy two games just to get the songs that the JP version had in one. And to twist the knife even more, some songs such as Max. and R3 were still left out of the game! So even after paying twice as much, you still didn’t have the full experience. Because of this the Original Japanese version ending up becoming one of the most sought after import games on the PS2.

And this is why, in my opinion, DDR EXTREME (USA) is the single worst American version of a Japanese game.