Difficulty, effort and the hardest routines
The hard routines, the exhausting ones, and the ones that only look easy.
The hardest routines in Just Dance: Decades of Hits are MORE & MORE (Extreme) and Midnight Sun (hard) from the 2020s block, plus the Extreme alternates for Wannabe and NUEVAYoL. The most physically demanding are Jump and Sing Hallelujah!. The gentlest are Uptown Girl, Coconut and Mamma Mia.
Two different things get called "difficulty" in a Just Dance game, and mixing them up is why people bounce off routines they were told were easy.
Official Ubisoft in-game screenshot.
Technical difficulty is how hard the choreography is to hit: phrase density, tempo, how much the routine changes versus repeats. Effort is how much it costs your body: how continuous the movement is, how much of it is upper body, how little recovery time you get. A routine can be high in one and low in the other, and Decades of Hits has examples of both.
The hardest routines
| Routine | Rating | Why it is hard |
|---|---|---|
| MORE & MORE (TWICE) | Extreme | Highest phrase density in the base game; almost no repeating chorus to lean on |
| Midnight Sun (Zara Larsson) | Hard | Fast, continuous, and unforgiving about timing |
| Wannabe — Extreme (Spice Girls) | Extreme | Hardest alternate; patterned after the quintet but with one dancer covering every lane |
| NUEVAYoL — Extreme (Bad Bunny) | Extreme | Removes the partner from a duet that was already the block's hardest |
| Danza Kuduro (Don Omar & Lucenzo) | Hard | Fast footwork; the routine most often called unfair on first contact |
The most physically demanding
| Routine | Why it exhausts |
|---|---|
| Jump (Van Halen / Metal Russell) | Continuous upper-body movement, no easy chorus, rated intense |
| Sing Hallelujah! (Dr. Alban) | Solo with almost no standing still |
| Turn Down for What | Club tempo across three lanes; three dancers means three times the movement per minute |
| In Too Deep (Sum 41) | Punk tempo for a quartet; everyone is busy for the whole song |
Jump is the one to watch. It is rated intense and, unusually for the block it sits in, it is a solo — so there is nobody to share the load with. It is an excellent exercise track and a terrible opening song.
The gentlest routines
| Routine | Routine type | Why it is a safe pick |
|---|---|---|
| Uptown Girl (Billy Joel) | Solo | Big readable arm shapes, low intensity, forgiving timing |
| Coconut (SMiLE.dk) | Duet | Short, light, cartoon staging |
| Mamma Mia (ABBA) | Duet | Slow tempo, repeating chorus, reworked routine — new to veterans too |
| Bye Bye Bye (*NSYNC) | Trio | Clean three-lane choreography, the best tracking test in the game |
| Starlight (The Supermen Lovers) | Duet | The 2000s block's easiest duet |
These five are also the best way to diagnose a setup problem. If your scores on Uptown Girl are consistently poor, the issue is latency, phone placement or network — not you. The phone controller guide walks through the causes in order.
Picking by skill level
- Never played a Just Dance game: Uptown Girl, then Coconut, then Bye Bye Bye.
- Comfortable with the basics: the entire 2000s block, the '90s duets, most of the 2010s.
- Wanting a challenge: Jump for effort, Danza Kuduro for footwork, the 2020s block for craft.
- Wanting the ceiling: MORE & MORE, then the two Extreme alternates.
The routine that divides people
Danza Kuduro is the most contested routine in the tracklist. Players who like it tend to have a dance or sports background; players who dislike it report that the footwork does not telegraph through the on-screen ghost. It is rated hard and it earns that rating on the feet rather than the arms, which is unusual for the series — most hard routines are hard in the upper body. Play it after the room has warmed up, not as an opener.
