Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix already offers more than a typical DDR game with the style, characters, and minigames. The press video shows Mario getting down with other characters like Luigi, shyguys, Waluigi, and Toad, while the game field included typical Mario enemies like Koopas and Boos mixed into the arrows for some surely hilarious purpose.

Variable challenges are already far and beyond what other DDR challenge modes have had. Apparently, there's some sort of storyline centering around Wario and Waluigi being jerks and, as I'm guessing, Mario must dance to save the world. There are objective-based dance sessions, like getting Toad to the other side of a river. There are plenty of minigames, too; there's a whack-a-mole game where Mario hammers Goombas as the player steps on the proper arrow. There's a side-scrolling platformer in which Mario runs and jumps as the player steps on left, right, and up. There's an item-catching game, presumably done by stepping left and right. From the video, it also looks like there's a two-player battle mode that uses enemies (or items?) in the playing field. In any case, it looks like a good chance to literally stomp on a Koopa shell.

What's still unknown is whether it will include support for more than two players or which songs it will include. There's definitely a huge pool of Nintendo songs, licensed songs, and Konami songs to draw on, so we can expect good music and a whole lot of arrows to step on. There's at least one Mario song as indicated from the screenshots. As for the step patterns, only regular four-arrow play was seen. For experienced DDR players, the video showed 'Normal' and 'Hard' difficulties, which looked to be about the equivalent of 'Light' and 'Standard' in terms of difficulty. It's unknown if a 'Heavy' equivalent is in it yet. Perfect and Great steps are recorded as usual, but Good and Boo are scored as one 'Early/Late' category.

DDR Mario Mix comes out July 14 in Japan, and in October in the US.