Sound Design, as expected plays a pretty large role in rhythm and music based games. I can’t even say “Dance Dance Revolution” without imitating the games start-up title sound (imagine an amped up announcer over-enunciating the game-title). That being said, outside of the music within the gameplay, I’ve never been particularly impressed with the overall sound design of these sorts of games. They tend to (outside of the song/gameplay) over-emphasize (with aggressive sound effects) button presses. The same sorts of over-the-top sound effects found on mobile apps, like Candy Crush. This might be due to the arcade style design of DDR (and slightly less-so Guitar Hero or Rock Band). DDR is a flashy game, everything from the songs, to the graphics are meant to attract attention of young players spending their afternoons in the arcade, the item selection needs to match the driving pace of in-game songs.
Guitar Hero and Rock Band have similar ‘faults’ (I hesitate to call the sound effects poor choices because I can imagine how they could improve gameplay by adding a sense of importance — but I just find them annoying). For the most part, transitions between cut scenes, set lists and actual game play is punctuated by a loud muted-guitar strum (in case you forget you are playing a game about rock bands).
It is interesting that games that rely solely on the trust that players like music would put so little into out of song gameplay sound design.