After grinding to unlock everything in 4th Mix I eventually had to come to this game to finish playing every PS1 DDR game (Yes even Dancing Stage which is just European DDR) anyways THE NEW UI NOW THIS IS WHERE DDR UIS PEAKED same goes for characters this is Alice and Maho's debut game and it has my favorite version of Janet.
The tracklist is fine, personally I'm not a fan of most of the default songs for this game but after playing these songs over and over again just to unlock things I did grow to like a few of them.

After a tokimemo-themed warmup, I am officially awoken from true DDR hibernation for the fall and winter, baby. Getting back into DDR in the fall is always a bit of a slow start due to the fact that its at the peak of cold/flu season so I always feel like crap getting back into this not only from being out of shape but also from fending off disease. True dancing gamers push on through such things. No matter how I'm feeling, all I need to see is footage from ancient japanese freestyle DDR competitions of 20 years ago to motivate me to jump around on the ol pad for an hour before I collapse from exhaustion.

As for the actual game, it's aight. I'd rate the setlist just about as good as 4th or extra mix in that there's a handful of bangers I kept going back to scattered through a pile of eh. Shoutouts to Captain Jack doing an english cover of odoru ponpokorin, that felt like it was made specifically for me lmfao. This game also runs at 60 FPS compared to literally every previous game running at 30 and it feels GOOD. The stepcharts are also really well-developed, compared to other games I found myself popping off HARD after finishing songs way more often just because of how good they felt to step through. It really feels like Konami has been subtly polishing the core DDR gameplay throughout the series so far. Speaking about the series so far, this game also essentially serves as a tribute to what's been done, as not only is there a 200-image gallery of various characters, backgrounds, and merchandise from the series up to this point, but the game also includes a complete archive of the old DDR websites data bank of user-submitted custom charts for all the previous DDR games. There are over 3000 fan-made custom charts of varying quality you can download to your memory card to give a breath of fresh air to your existing DDR game catalog, and that's hella cool. I wonder if anyone has actually played them all.

It's kinda funny that the setlist is really this games weakest quality, as this would absolutely be a top-tier DDR game if it had the setlist of something like 3rdmix. Everything else is top-notch and a solid send-off to the PS1 era of japanese DDR games before the series moves on to the next generation of game hardware.

(And this game marks the debut of Alice!!! I always used the player 2 side so I could play as her, she's the best I hope I can play as her in all the future games)

Back in the day my family got me a PSOne that came bundled with a dancing mat but no DDR to be seen (that store really wanted to get rid of their ps1 accessory stock to make space for more PS2s lol), tho I eventually got my hands on 5thMIX. It was my introduction to rhythm games and a general aesthetic that I still think very highly of even 20+ years later, both ui design and character design (5thMIX Emi may have been my first videogame crush). I played it with my family all the time, my older brother also had a dancing mat so we could go at it together and it was great. I never got to play the arcade version so I could have been missing out on a lot of stuff and I'll never know, but honestly who cares, even as it is, the PS1 version of this game remains very important to me.

Banger in arcades, not so much at home. 5th Mix's original songlist is pretty weak without the wealth of returning tracks from 1-4, and since they already put the 4+ songs into Extra mix, you're just left with poor varieties of eurotrance and j-pop.

Shame too, cause it's the only notable PS1 release at 60fps. It was the first of these I got running on duckstation with perfect timing w/o a hitch. I love Extra Mix, but maybe it would've been better if they waited to consolidate those songs into this package.