Time has been cruel to Dance Dance Revolution. This game is just proving it.
So I'm being as unbiased as possible when I say that the music in DDR: SN is not that good. In my opinion it's atrocious. I was a fan of the original Konami music and bought SuperNOVA expecting more of that. Instead I was shot down by a bunch of horrible licensed tracks like songs by Kelly Clarkson, Hilary Duff and Fall Out Boy. The only songs I really enjoyed were Let's Dance by David Bowie and the majority of the few original remixes there were to choose from that include a new remix of Healing Vision and Max 300. The song list is a serious issue in a music oriented game. This is almost as bad as what happened with DDR: Extreme 2.
That brings me to two or three other problems. Unlocking content is a pain because you have to play a Stellar Master Mode in which you step your way to becoming the MASTER OF THE GALAXY! All this is, is you through different challenges that slowly open up new options in the Shop to buy mediocre songs. The only good songs are at the end and unfortunately I can only play them in Stellar Master Mode because I can't beat them to unlock them for Game Mode.
Second problem is that there are just way too many Modes. A bunch of content you probably won't like. That EyeToy thing is back although I'm sure noone even owns an EyeToy and if you do, good for you. You have that to play with. There's a Game Mode, an Advanced Mode which is last year's Challenge Mode and Nonstop Mode. There's a Training Mode, a Practice Mode, an Edit Mode, Battle Mode and Workout Mode which is completely useless and of course the infamous Stellar Master Mode that I mentioned.
My third problem with this game is the difficulty. The easiest difficulty is ridiculously easy, even the Standard difficulty is, but the Heavy difficulty is over the roof with stuttery and confusing steps that hurt your feet after a couple of minutes. Dance Dance by Fall Out Boy should not be that hard and yet it's in the Top 10 hardest songs in the game. This proves that they tried to lighten it up more for beginners and spicen it way too much for experts but that leaves intermediate players with the sad fact that they'll never get better playing this game.
So my conclusion with this game is that considering it has an array of Modes that are really all the same thing with a little gimmick and a long list of mediocre songs, followed by making you play through a frustratingly long campaign to unlock more songs, Konami is just taking everything that made the first few console games like DDR: Max and Extreme good and trying to make it better. Thus, completely failing in the process and killing the franchise. I also don't find it so great that a DDR game comes out every year. They might as well just name the next one Dance Dance Revolution '09, release it early this year and we'll mark it in the Sports section.