Just Dance (Wii)
Just Dance may just be the most prolific series on Nintendo’s Wii console, producing multiple spin-offs and yearly installments well beyond the point the Wii console stopped receiving new titles from any other company. With the Wii being both focused on casual players and packing a motion sensing controller, Ubisoft struck gold with its dance game formula, but the Just Dance series didn’t quite get off to the smoothest of starts.
One of the most striking moments when playing Just Dance will be the player’s first encounter with the spartan menu design. Despite being a game about getting up and active to peppy music, the menus are rather utilitarian and lack any real flair. Until you get to the track selection screen, the game seems lacking in energy. This would feel a little less jarring if the menus themselves weren’t so barren as well. There are very few modes on offer and all the game’s content is available from the start, the game focusing almost purely on the simple fun of dancing to the songs on offer. There is a warm up option to help players get limber in anticipation of the dancing, but everything else is either pure dancing or very small variations on the rules that don’t truly feel different enough to warrant experiencing every song on every mode.
The main mode is the dancing rhythm game, the player holding the Wii Remote in one hand and trying to match the movements of an onscreen dancer as closely as possible. The dancer is a bright neon character with glowing white skin, lacking any facial features but often dressed up to match whatever fashions feel a good match for the song. This can be as simple as wearing 80s clothes for a song from the 1980s or can be intentionally ridiculous like a person in a dog costume being your visual guide for the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, but their designs are always fairly readable thanks to the design choice leading to identifiable limbs and gestures. What is a bit harder to read are the pictograms, small simplified human silhouettes that scroll across the bottom of the screen that are meant to tell you what gestures are required next to keep up with the current dance. Not as visually clear as the large dancers, they rely on arrows to show how limbs are meant to be moved, but they fail to communicate certain details like the speed of the motion or how often it must be repeated. Usually a set of pictograms will come in all at once to tell you the next few moves before you need to remember and repeat them, but the need to gauge the speed from the dancer can lead to early flubs in a song. For example, a pictogram might show that you need to point soon, but it doesn’t indicate that you need to do it thrice quickly, this being something you learn from the dancer and need to remember whenever the pictogram resurfaces within that specific song only. A single song only has a few different dance moves total and they’re fairly easy to learn once you get through the early parts, but the odd requirement of sussing out a pictogram’s true meaning does hamper the beginning of any dance session.
Earning points through accurately recreating the intended dance moves is the goal of the regular dancing, and while there are no true goals in Just Dance since you can’t lose a song no matter how poorly you do and there are no tangible rewards for doing perfectly, you can earn gold borders and a crown on a song if you do an exemplary job reproducing the required gestures. The game does seem to have some issues accurately detecting your movements though. The Wii Remote isn’t the most accurate when it comes to pure motion detection, meaning sometimes you can seemingly be doing a move right but aren’t getting the credit for it. On top of this, the game expects more motions from your body than it can possibly read. You have to hold the Wii Remote in one hand, but many moves require actions from the free hand or your legs. While it literally cannot tell if you choose to not do these moves, the game will rate you on them and provide points if it thinks you performed them. Perhaps it attempts to read for subtle movements in the remote based on the idea you should be a little active rather than still and waiting for the next move that requires the Wii Remote wielding arm, but it does at least seem a bit generous here and will mostly only deem the action a failure if you also failed the preceding action that did require Wii Remote movement.
The detection issues are definitely the biggest downside in Just Dance. It can be quite enjoyable to get up and move, especially since every mode allows up to four players to play so you can have a little dance party with the 32 songs on offer. You can cheese the motions sometimes, especially the ones it can’t actually read, but if you try to be faithful to mimicking the onscreen dancer, it’s got that simple joy of dancing going for it. Unfortunately, the two extra modes it offers beyond the simple score challenge aren’t too hot. There’s a mode called Strike a Pose where you are once more dancing all the same to the songs but at random points the game will tell you to freeze, the player needing to stand still for a bit before getting back into the action. It’s not really substantial and just clumsily interrupts the flow and rhythm of the music, and while that’s certainly the challenge of coming to such a quick stop, it doesn’t add enough to make this alternate mode have much longevity. The more interesting mode comes in Last One Standing where a failure condition is added in that a player will have to stop dancing once they’ve run out of lives, each missed move subtracting some health but the players can get back some health if they are able to execute five consecutive moves without issue. The detection is what kills this mode’s potential though, a loss too likely to come from the game not picking up the Wii Remote properly or players having that awkward pictogram learning phase bring things to an all too quick end.
One thing I can’t fault the game for is its selection of music. While taste in music varies wildly between individuals, the 32 songs on offer cast a wide net meant to incorporate different dance types and genres while still remaining pretty recognizable. Stretching all the way back to the 1960s as well as featuring a few hits of the time, Just Dance mostly features the versions done by the original artists, or in cases like “A Little Less Conversation” it is a remix of an Elvis Presley song done by famous DJ Junkie XL. From incredibly recognizable tunes like Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” to songs like “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba” by Fatboy Slim that almost seem to be here because they can provide a different dancing style, the game tries to be broad but still makes sure there are enough major hits that people will want to dance to as soon as they see it in the track list. There is an option to play truncated versions of the song if you don’t want to play a full song, but there are no overly long ones on offer or any that get too complicated in what they ask of you.
The dance moves assigned to the songs are even more varied though, very little repetition existing between the songs. Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe” goes for hoedown inspired moves, Iggy Pop’s cover of “Louie Louie” features plenty of air guitar, The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” is appropriately manic, and Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time”… foregoes the dance it was inspired by and instead turns cooking and household work into dance moves. While not every song can be easily described as following a theme or style with its movements, they are well choreographed for their purpose, that being entertaining moves to perform that won’t strain casual dancers and feature enough repeated moves that you can easily respond to the prompts once you’ve gotten through the learning phase of the song. Had the controls been up to snuff, someone’s personal tastes in music would be the only reason to really fault the actual music selection.
THE VERDICT: Just Dance truly is just about dancing. A no frills experience with very few options outside of just moving to the music for the sake of it, Just Dance did have the potential to be a casual amusement thanks to the diverse track list providing plenty of unique dances while also swinging for mostly recognizable and appropriate tunes. However, the game’s problems with detecting if a move was performed correctly and the unclear pictograms make it hard to just get lost in the enjoyment of moving your body to the beat. Being told you moved incorrectly either because the Wii Remote didn’t pick it up or the game really had no actual way of determining if you were moving right with the rest of your body dampens the enjoyment of a game that tried to only do one thing and sadly couldn’t pull it off well enough to justify its laser focus.
And so, I give Just Dance for Nintendo Wii…
A BAD rating. Getting up and moving around while playing Just Dance does feel good at first, the track list a good match for the activity and the dance moves providing plenty of variety across the different songs. Even if you do your best to match the motions expected of you though, it’s hard not to get disheartened by the game telling you that you messed up even when nothing seemed to be incorrect about your movements. The Wii Remote just isn’t up to the tasks asked of it in Just Dance’s current state, the game requiring much more leniency to prevent the problems with its own inaccurate grading. Even if the detection was better though then you have the issues with properly communicating the moves to the player for a dance, each stage starting with that unfortunate phase where you have to suss out the true meaning of the pictograms. The fault doesn’t fully lie with the hardware though, Just Dance not compromising its choreography and not communicating the steps well enough to survive even if the Wii Remote was a bit more precise.
Just Dance isn’t a game I want to rate poorly because the dancing was truly enjoyable, it’s just the game kept getting in the way of that enjoyment. It’s the framework the player moves to, so docking points and giving unclear guidance can’t be ignored just because finding the rhythm with your body feels satisfying. There’s nothing really stopping you from dancing and disregarding the scoring system problems, but at that point Just Dance is just a music CD instead of a video game, and since its extra modes are weak as well, players would probably be better served moving on to a future title in the series. While I cannot definitively say future Just Dance games improved on the problems featured here until I play them, it is clear the first step Ubisoft took into this gameplay style was a sloppy one.