There's a lot of small things I want to talk about here so I'll break it down the best I can.
Positive:
- The attention to detail is phenomenal. I love how the girl's hair blows in the wind when a train rolls by, or how she points in the corresponding direction when saying up, down, left, and right. The animation really is top-notch.
- The music is fantastic, and while the call/response style of the songs is a little weird at first, it ends up working really well. Overall presentation with the Vocaloid-ish style is really slick. Blammed was by far my favorite track.
- Step patterns are intuitive and realistic. I can't stand the Stepmania patterns that are impossible with your feet, whereas everything here could easily be done on an actual pad. UPDATE: As of Week 7, some of the harder charts would be nearly impossible to do with your feet. The arrows also get annoyingly fast when it would just make more sense for them to be slower but closer together.
Negative:
- Performance suffers pretty badly. My framerate dipped into the high 20s at some points and usually seemed to hover in the 40s. This also seemed to be highly dependent on the song (which I assume means it has something to do with the background animations.) I get that the player character has to respond to player input, but could the rest of the animations be baked instead?
- The player doesn't get enough feedback! The score is really unintuitive, as you never really know if you're doing well or not based on a number unless you've played that specific song several times before. The original AAA-E ratings, combo system, and feedback (Marvelous-Boo) of DDR keep the player better informed of their performance. Personally I breezed through all five weeks on hard on my first attempt, but a lot of my button presses would have counted as "almosts" if the game gave feedback on how precise your timing was. Obviously I can see that my scores are lower than other peoples' on the leaderboard, but I'd prefer to have some feedback in-game that isn't just relative to how other players have done.
- I get why the arrows are colored the way they are; someone that isn't used to the left/down/up/right sequence will recognize the directions because they match the PlayStation's face buttons. That said, the original DDR arrows have animations matching the beat, making it easier to step perfectly in time, and the lack of color-coding makes this a bit more difficult than necessary. Having options to change arrow style would be greatly appreciated. Also, the freeze arrows need to be clearer - the transparent tails made me miss a good chunk of them.
Overall:
Fantastic presentation - both the animations and music are significantly better than anything I've seen from Bemani. Unfortunately, user experience suffers because of how little information the player has about their own performance.