DDR EXTREME [JP CS] - ULTRA16 Oni Course

DDR EXTREME. Everyone's favorite mix, and it's still quite popular today among DDR players. Since I never grew up with it, all my nostalgia goes to MAX2, but EXTREME is still really good. It introduced the Marvelous timing window, the Beginner difficulty, and brought back a crap ton of old songs. The Oni courses are pretty notable too. Legend Road is the most famous, but the console version has something infinitely harder: ULTRA16.
Oh boy, Konami held nothing back (other than PSMO) when making this course. Half of the songs in the course are 10-footers, and nearly every hard song in the game is in here. This is easily a huge jump up from the other three courses I've done on this channel, and it doesn't get this hard again for a long time. I'm looking at you, BOSH RUSH (Ver. SN2).
I spent an incredibly long time grinding this course. Not as long as ULTRA12, but still enough to make me try the course backwards to practice the later songs first. All that time made me able to get very few misses and good MA counts on every song. Even then, I got a lot more misses than I hoped for. I still have never FC'd Maxx Unlimited, and I always miss in A CSP, but there were too many songs that I just got stupid misses on. On the flipside, I got some crazy FC's, like with The Legend of Max and Paranoia Survivor Max.
In terms of relative difficulty, it fluctuates a lot throughout the course. The first five songs are pretty easy, and Xenon is straight-forward with practice. The first major roadblock is Maxx Unlimited. It's the second hardest song in the course, after Max Period. Fast technical patterns and loads of jumps can easily make you choke. Fortunately, you're given a generous break after that with My Summer Love, Sakura, and Kakumei. The Legend of Max is tricky but not as hard as Maxx Unlimited. Then you get to the last four songs...
Bag is just brutal with how slow and dense the song is. 65 BPM and loads of offsync triplets is just a horrible combination. It had to open up a window of my playing it at 3x just to be able to read the damn thing. Paranoia Survivor Max (which strangely isn't the Challenge chart), has 290 BPM crossovers, but that's really it. Cartoon Heroes' chart is just awful, and easily a huge choke point for being the penultimate song of the course. And then there's Max Period, the hardest song in the game. I'm actually pretty good at this song, although the background video creates lag on my emulator and occasionally eats inputs (like it did here). Unlike with Bag, I actually memorized the 600 BPM section. It's shorter and the timing is both harder and more important.
Despite all the misses, I did good everywhere else, and am very happy that I completed this.
Final Score: 17532
Player: Espik
Platform: PCSX2
Controller: Keyboard

[@DXUltimate]

ULTRA16 was no joke back in the day. Most people walked away from it because of MAXX U alone lol.

[@Espik_23]

That song is just a ball-buster. Rhythmically tricky, lots of jumps, and 320 BPM is a recipe for pain.

[@DREADFALCON13]

I don't know what's harder.
16 hard songs with four lives? (Ultra 16)
Or 5 super hard songs with four lives? (Boss Rush-SN2)

[@Espik_23]

Bosh Rush SN2 has 5 songs. I also think it’s harder even with less songs, since there’s a big difference between 15s/16s and 18s

[@DREADFALCON13]

@@Espik_23 Oops. Fixed that error. I forgot...

[@ViolentBooGaming]

Why did they throw bag in there

[@Espik_23]

Probably because it was a 10-footer back then. I don’t like it, either

[@THENAMEISQUICKMAN]

because you can't use speed mods in challenge courses, and reading bag on 1x is a joke

[@DutchNeX]

PRECIOSOOOOOO

[@AceofAces777]

“You were doing alright till halfway”
…wat?

[@Espik_23]

I am convinced it’s an oversight

[@AceofAces777]

Maybe a course with that many songs throws the game off lol. Nice job!

[@Espik_23]

@@AceofAces777 Every Oni Course in the game has this issue

[@HurricanePatrick]

You're terrible at this game

[@burni988]

💀