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Japan 2017

John

TS Member
Favourite Ride
Steel Vengeance
Some of us are currently mid way through a large Asia trip. I'm just doing the Japan leg, featuring Universal Studios, Nagashima Spa land, Parque Espana, Fuji-Q and Tokyo Disneyland/sea, plus a couple of other minor parks.

Currently I'm writing from the Dodonpa queue line at Fuji-Q, but to avoid skipping ahead, I'm going to rewind back to Universal.

USJ is one of the busiest parks in the world, our day there was no exception resulting in 2hr+ queues on most major rides and a longest advertised queue of an astonishing 300 minutes for Minions. Thankfully due to use of SRQs and excellent opening hours we managed to do everything we wanted to, including some rerides, without ever queueing more than about an hour.

Passing over the entrance is the relatively tiny Hollywood Dream. Clearly USJ's take on Rip Ride Rocket (including on board audio), this B&M mega respite being the smallest of its kind by some distance is still a quality ride, unlike it's Floridian counterpart.

A number of rides will be familiar to anyone who has visited US Florida, whilst others hark bark to the early days of the US parks. Backdraft and Jaws are both classic Universal, and as I only visited Florida for the first time in 2015, I was very glad USJ has held onto these retro attractions.

Forbidden Journey, Spiderman and Jurassic Park can all be found in Florida. Potter here has been updated to 4k&3D, with some minor scene changes too. 4k is a big improvement, 3d not so much. To avoid running out of lockers due to long queues, you wait the outdoor section in reverse compared with Florida, then enter via the walkthrough. The Florida indoor queue is used as the walkthrough here. Spiderman is much the same as Florida, but with twin stations for better throughput. Queue still hit 150 even with the capacity boost. Can't comment on JP, as we skipped it.

Returning to unique attractions, Space Fantasy has been the subject of much interest on here when it opened, however it currently features a "Dreams come true" (me neither) overlay. Some weird animated pop duo, so the usual music is changed, as are the preshows and some of the on ride scenes, but nothing major.

Flying Dinosaur is the most recent of the major coasters, I've never really been a fan of B&M flyers, the Superman clones are fire and I'm not a big fan of Manta either, so my expectations were not high, however I was absolutely blown away. Flying Dinosaur is absolutely phenomenal, long, fast and incredibly intense, easily one of my top coasters, just a shame about the enormous queues it gets.

Of the minor rides, Hippogriff is basically the same as Florida, there's also another kiddy coaster in the kiddy area, which is surprisingly well themed, worth doing if the queue isn't using any of the extensions.

On the whole, USJ is a quality park, but unless you visit on a quiet day, get lucky with SRQs or get fastpass you're likely to struggle, seems the locals are far more queue tolerant than us. At Fuji-Q, we'll find out just how much.
 
Have a great time @John. I think Hollywood RRR is a take on Hollywood Dream, if anything. Are they still running backwards trains?

Good luck at Fuji - perhaps one of the most frustrating parks I've ever visited.
 
Hollywood Dream Backdrop is still a thing. One train out of 4 in use during our visit was running backwards, we didn't ride due to the long, slow queue and lack of SRQ, though to be fair there were 5 queues as it was so adding another SRQ would probably be a bit much.

Fuji Q report to follow, but first a revisit to Nagashima, then a first visit to Espana.

My previous visit to Nagashima was less than a year ago, but since then their new coaster had opened and is a great addition to their line up. Arashi is a standard S&S free spin coaster, the first of its type I've done. It's a big improvement on Intamin's effort, using magnets to give the cars a kick whilst avoiding excessive spinning which might be unpleasant. For a new ride queues were entirely reasonable due to decent if unspectacular operations, though the park seemed slightly quieter than my last visit - possibly due to rain early in the day. SD2K still got an hour wait, partially due to the crazy length of time it takes for trains to move from the brakes to the station and partially due the use of lockers on the station platform and the associated faff.

Corkscrew was also new for me, being closed on my last visit for Arashi construction. Arrow's version of the layout is far shorter than vekoma's, ending after the turnaround following the titular corkscrews, but at least this one was largely inoffensive.

I'm not going to repeat too much from my previous TR, suffice to say that I still think the park would be a bit of a misery if it were busy, but otherwise can offer a good day out due to a large number and range of rides, even if the majority of them are nothing special. Steel Dragon is a fantastic headline coaster though.
 
Some time later, it's time for the next installment, Parque Espana.

PE is part of a larger Spanish-themed resort, and the rides seem to be almost a secondary aspect at the park, nevertheless there are a couple of first class coasters and a few other notable rides. Most of the rides are concentrated on the left side of the park, though the park also extends back a long way. This area is largely filled with plazas and themed buildings, with one or two smaller rides.

The headline coaster is undoubtedly Pyrenees, one of the tallest and longest B&M inverts in the world. The first half is excellent, particularly the zero-g and cobra, unfortunately the section after the MCBR fails to deliver, the worst offender being an extremely long shallow ramp which offers very little, followed by an 'airtime' hill, where a second corkscrew might have been a better use of track. The main reason for us only riding twice however was the slowest operations on any B&M I've ever seen, with around 9 minutes between trains (the ride hosts didn't batch until the previous guests had got off, then gave a lengthy spiel prior to opening the airgates. Even with a queue length never exceeding 2 cycles it was incredibly tedious to wait for.

Thankfully the Mack mine train Gran Montserrat was running 2 trains and being operated reasonably efficiently. We'd heard positive reviews of this ride and it certainly didn't disappoint. Both sections of the ride are well paced with bursts of intensity, but still firmly within the family-thrill bracket. Beneath Gran Montserrat is what appears to be a clone of EP's log flume, complete with train passing under the first lift/drop.

The park also boasts an unusual indoor coaster Tron Butt Iron Bull (seriously, look at the logo). This steampunk themed coaster features some impressive theming mid way round, in what feels like it should be a launch preshow, but actually precedes a small second lift with nothing of note beyond. Not a bad ride by any means, but beware of the extremely limited leg room in the cars.

As well as a 4th (pretty decent kiddy) coaster, the park has several dark rides of varying quality. There's an interactive shoot-the-monsters ride, a Nutcracker themed ride that consists mainly of 2d scenes lit by about a million Christmas lights and a suspended dark ride featuring the park's various mascots which was by far the best of the bunch.

Overall, it was a very pleasant park, but given the remote location and associated cost and travel time required to visit I'd be hesitant to recommend it, despite the quality of their top 2 coasters.
 
When you say Mack mine train, as in POWERED? Running two trains? Is that one of a kind?
 
It's more like a miniature version of a Vekoma mine train, using Eurosat style trains but using conventional lift hills.
 
Some time later, and it’s on to Fuji-Q.

Fuji-Q is internationally renowned almost as widely for it’s appalling ride operations as it is for its collection of extreme coasters, and as such it was a park I was somewhat apprehensive about visiting - given that I have what could be called an obsession with operational efficiency.

We arrived at the station next to the park on the evening before our visit, the park had already closed for the day and was almost completely dark with the rides silent, giving a somewhat ominous feel. This was not eased the next morning by our choice of route to the main entrance. There are two entrances, a small one near Eejanaika (by the railway station) and the main entrance at the opposite end by Fujiyama. We had been advised that the smaller one is not always open, so headed round to the main entrance, on a route the park has long since forgotten might be used by pedestrians. A path is present (once you reach the main road to the park entrance), complete with tunnels under the motorway and a subway under the slip road, but it’s very overgrown and the subway was completely dark. Not a great first impression really.

Poor first impressions continue as you join a queue snaking round the car park. This queue is for entrance to the gift shop at the main entrance, tickets are purchased beyond this – putting anyone who doesn’t already have theirs at a significant disadvantage as they can just go straight in whilst we would have to queue again. Once through the shop, there’s a rather charming recreation of a French village to walk through before reaching the ticket booths and park entrance beyond.

Our first port of call was the park’s fasttrack kiosk. By the time we’d bought our entry tickets, Do-dodonpa had sold out, so we opted for 1 each of the other 3 big coasters – Fujiyama, Eejanaika and Takabisha. Do-dodonpa then became our first port of call, which despite our best efforts at making a rapid start had already amassed a 3-figure queue time.

Why the long waits? Fuji-Q doesn’t really seem to get that many guests relative to the number and nature of their rides, unfortunately for the most part the balance is firmly tilted towards seemingly unnecessary safety procedures (including a multitude of extra seat belts), coupled with various other procedures added on top that get in the way of running the rides. Most of the coasters achieve around a quarter to a third of the throughput they could be expected to get in a well-operated park. Sadly this is just the tip of the iceberg in the poor operations. Bad weather all but shuts down the park, which given its location is not ideal, the park opening hours bear little reflection to the ride opening hours – whilst the park was open until 10pm on the day of our visit, only 6 rides stayed open until then, including just 1 of the big 4. To make matters worse, queues close early to allow the ride to close at the stated time. Announcements were made from early-evening stating that people waiting are not guaranteed a ride even if they’re in the queue – it seems the ride will shut at the stated time regardless of how many people are still waiting. Consequently by 6pm - some 4 hours before closing time, some queues had started to close (this is announced park wide in Japanese and English, along with a variety of other announcements, mainly weather related closures/reopenings. Voiceover guy got rather annoying by the end of the day).

Despite all of the above and the weather’s best efforts to stop us, we still managed to ride all the coasters and a small number of other rides too, so what of the physical rides?

Do-dodonpa – now featuring a loop rather than a top hat and an even faster launch on top of what was already absurd acceleration. I didn’t ride the original, but the loop is a bit of a non-event really, as is the huge turnaround that precedes it (bonus points for the fire effect, though I think it was only turned on at night as I didn't notice it during our ride). The launch is, of course, completely nuts – trying to follow it would be very difficult, but it might have been nice if they’d made a bit of an effort.

Fujiyama – I didn’t really know what to expect from a Togo hyper. The start is a bit odd, but then settles down into a largely inoffensive ride (think a slightly better PMBO), unfortunately at the end it completely forgets what a hyper should do and tries to pull off some bizarre twisty hills which just don’t work at all. This was the only major ride we rode twice – the first time the ending was almost hilariously bad, but by the evening it had warmed up too much and crossed over into deeply unpleasant. Another operational irritant - by 8pm it had gone down to 1 train with a queue of over an hour - WHY‽

Takabisha – GERST DO YOUR WORST! Prior to riding I’d forgotten the order of the two parts of the ride and got it into my head that the launch is at the start second half, but it’s the other way round. A slightly odd choice as it means the ride gets off to a massive start and is then brought to a stop for the lift hill which completely ruins the flow. There’s a pointless indoor section leading from the first set of brakes round to the lift, but we rode at night so it didn’t matter much. Good ride on the whole, the best Eurofighter style ride I've done by some margin (Smiler is still my #1 Gerst though).

Eejanaika – rcdb.com reckons this translates to “Ain’t it Great". I have no idea if that’s accurate or not but I’d love to think that it is. Occasionally there are rides that I think might be awful, but I really want them to be great. Very occasionally, a ride can still scare me. This was one of those rare coasters on both counts. After going through the rigmarole of removing anything from pockets and storing them in the station lockers (along with shoes), then fastening the 3 separate seat belts (lap belt, connection from one side of the restraint to the other and a connection from restraint to seat), adjusting the various parts of the restraint (staff check – rider check – staff check – staff check, in that order), going through the safety briefing and dispatch dance that the staff do for some reason, it’s finally time to ride. To cut to the chase, the ride is simply phenomenal. Without question one of the most intense coasters out there, yet somehow capturing the incredible graceful flying through air experience that Swarm has on the zero-g and Griffon on the immelmahns. It’s a short ride, but the final element packs so much in to such a short length of track it defies belief – it shouldn’t be possible to twist through so many directions in so little space and time.

In terms of other rides, there’s also a local version of a Wild Mouse, which took the concept and threw out all the drops to make an already fairly bland coaster completely forgettable, a kiddy coaster that does pretty much nothing and a weird suspended one that I spend the entire ride worrying about losing my wallet on rather than paying attention to what was going on. The park has jumped on the current trend of flying theatres, but only put 40 seats in theirs to make the queue a misery. We also squoze™ in a ride on a Thomas land dark ride which was actually pretty decent, and the Huss Giant Frisbee (which I forget the name of, but themed as a pizza for some reason), which was much better than the same ride at Nagashima.

Total ride count in 13.5 hours = 11.

Fuji-Q is not a park I have any desire to return to, despite the fact that Eejanaika is one of my top 5 coasters. It’s not a particularly pleasant park to be in to begin with, and the complete lack of any effort to give guests a good day out leaves a bitter taste. We were due to have an extra part-day on park, but none of our group wanted to go back in so we headed straight on to Tokyo to take the pressure off our days there. It would be needed as the weather would cause us further trouble on the next few days as we visited the small parks around Tokyo…
 
Is Fuji-Q sort of like a Japanese Thorpe/Busch Gardens Tampa but with less theming, worse operations and (arguably) crazier coasters? When Shawn Sanbrooke from TPW visited, he said it was rather like Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
 
Is Fuji-Q sort of like a Japanese Thorpe/Busch Gardens Tampa but with less theming, worse operations and (arguably) crazier coasters? When Shawn Sanbrooke from TPW visited, he said it was rather like Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Size wise it's probably smaller than Thorpe Park in all honesty, at least in terms of the areas where rides are. As for the feel of the place, I guess it's kind of like Blackpool Pleasure Beach, but I'd say BPB tops it due to a little bit of a theme going on and their slightly more contemporary look that they've been going for lately. Weirdly Fuji Q has a lovely little French boulevard entrance, which looks fantastic:

yamanashi-cute-areas-at-fuji-q-highland-122855.jpg


However, once you're past the entrance gates, away from Thomas Land it really is just rides plonked on top of tarmac!
 
Size wise it's probably smaller than Thorpe Park in all honesty, at least in terms of the areas where rides are. As for the feel of the place, I guess it's kind of like Blackpool Pleasure Beach, but I'd say BPB tops it due to a little bit of a theme going on and their slightly more contemporary look that they've been going for lately. Weirdly Fuji Q has a lovely little French boulevard entrance, which looks fantastic:

yamanashi-cute-areas-at-fuji-q-highland-122855.jpg


However, once you're past the entrance gates, away from Thomas Land it really is just rides plonked on top of tarmac!
That entrance actually looks quite nice! The only time I have ever seen anything of Fuji-Q other than the coasters is in Shawn's vlog from the place, and it sort of reminded me of an Asian Cedar Point/SFMM (even though I've never been to either. My only American theme parks that I've visited are the major Florida parks other than Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios and the Fun Spot parks.)
 
We didn’t do it on this trip but me and someone else in the group did it on a trip three years ago. It’s a massive building and takes around 40 minutes to walk around but it doesn’t have that many actors and isn’t very scary


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Do you think it used to have more actors when the experience was brand new? I can imagine an attraction like that would have been mind blowing when new but the cost of running such a large scare maze wouldn't have been profitable after the initial hype.
 
That makes sense. It's a little disappointing to hear it's not very scary, I'd heard the theming was brilliantly detailed though.

To be fair though...Disneysea. Will anything else even count as theming after that?
 
I will hopefully get up to the Disney parks at some point, but in the meantime, there's the small matter of the small parks of Tokyo!

We visited 4 attractions in and around the city - Cosmoworld, Yomiuriland, Tokyo Dome City and Joypolis.

Joypolis falls somewhere between an arcade and an indoor theme park. Most of the attractions are game-based, but a lot of them certainly count as rides, including their headline attraction - a Gerst spinning coaster. Formerly Veil of Dark, now Gekion Live coaster, this is part guitar hero part spinning coaster. I'm not entirely convinced it really hangs together properly, plus with only 3 buttons the game is probably pretty trivial to guitar hero pros. Quite fun though, I'm not complaining about a launched inverting spinning coaster!
I didn't do any of the other rides, there was an interesting looking skateboarding style half pipe with rotating cars and a few things that wouldn't have seemed out of place in Disney quest. It's not really the sort of thing I could imagine working in the UK at any rate.

Cosmoworld is a small city park, split over 2 sides of a river. One side is mostly kiddy rides including a small coaster, the other side has most of the big stuff. The star attraction is Diving Coaster Vanish, so named for the drop into a tunnel half way round. The trains are way too small for tall adults, but it's quite a fun ride, bonus points for the fountains as it drops into the lake. Other rides on this side of the park include a generic spinner and a fairly decent 2-drop log flume, which features extended sections of track between each lift and drop, building up some speed before you get to the drop itself.

Yomiuriland is by far the most complete of the parks we did. It's quite a way out from the centre, and best accessed via a cable car up the hillside. As with the other parks, it's pay-per-ride, but they also offered a good value wristband in the afternoon that we took advantage of. The first ride on our radar was Spin Runway, another Gerst spinner - this one themed as a clothing factory. The queue line sets this up fairly well and is surprisingly well done, unfortunately the ride itself seemed much more sparse with very little really going on and not a particularly good ride to hide the fact. The biggest coaster by some margin in Bandit, which could have been well operated had it not been for the bizarre summer overlay which involved soaking one of the 2 trains in use with water from various fire hoses dotted around the layout, which apparently required them to dry off the train afterwards every time. We opted for the dry version, and were treated to a genuinely high-quality ride, to say it's the best Togo I've done hardly seems sufficient praise, but it's well worth a trip if you're in the area and have half a day spare.
The final coaster in the park is another oddity - Standing and Loop coaster. So named because of the 2 trains, one of which is fairly standard, the other being stand up. There are two stations side by side with trains leaving from a 3rd position between the two platforms, with two tracks on a sliding assembly. This thing also has the most bizarrely inefficient operations I've ever seen. The procedure went something like this:
  • Load one train.
  • Loaded train slides into dispatch position, other (empty) train simultaneously slides to its loading position
  • Loaded train goes round, other train sits in the station does nothing
  • Loaded train returns to station, transfers to boarding platform and unloads. Other train still does nothing.
  • Transfer track moves again to allow other train to load
  • Repeat.
Why they don't load one whilst the other goes round is beyond me, even if it means having people sat at the centre of the station for a bit. Anyway, as a result of this absurd procedure the relatively short queue was a misery to wait in, so we only did the sit-down version, which was a bit of a non-event in all honesty.

Tokyo Dome City/LaQua - on the itinerary for one reason only - Thunder Dolphin. This massive Intamin hypercoaster is famous for being the one built partially on top of a building and threading a ferris wheel on the way down. Sadly the ride itself really isn't up to much, due to the restrictions of the building it spends a lot of time trundling around at low speed doing very little. There's no airtime (the key selling point of the ride type) and the only real highlight is the final (surprisingly large) drop into the brakes. Not a ride to go out of your way for, but worth a visit to see it as it's an oddball. There's not a lot else of note in terms of rides, though there is a small kiddy area. Seems a bit of a shame as the RCDB page lists quite a few interesting coasters in the "defunct coasters" section.
 
OK moving on, to the final stop on our trip, Toyko Disney Resort. Located in Tokyo bay on at least partially reclaimed land, TDR was the 3rd Disney resort to open after Florida, unlike the sprawling Disney World resort, TDR feels much more self-contained, best accessed by transferring from the Tokyo train network to the Disney loop monorail, though those heading straight to Tokyo Disneyland can walk from the station.

The resort gateway station also serves the resort's village - Iksipari. From there, the monorail runs round to Disneyland, Bayside station (for partner hotels) and Disneysea. We were staying at the Bayside Hilton, and thanks to their policy of status-matching Craig's IHG membership, we were entitled to priority check in and lounge access. We had bay-view rooms rather than park view rooms, which certainly seem the better option at the moment, as the park in park view apparently refers mainly to car parks - those of the various hotels and Disneyland itself and a building site for the park's expansion beyond that. We meanwhile had a view out over the hotel pool and the bay - Disney parks are best viewed from within anyway.

Before entering the parks, a note about Tokyo's park hopper tickets. For reasons I don't fully understand, multi-day tickets at TDR only allow park hopping from the 3rd day onwards. On days 1 and 2 your ticket is valid at one park only. We opted to do land first and then sea, so the entirety of our first day would be spent at Disneyland.

During the design process for Tokyo Disneyland, much was clearly borrowed from the recently opened Magic Kingdom, most obviously the castle which is almost an exact copy of Florida's. The park layout will also feel familiar to anyone who has visited it's US sister park. The parks have diverged somewhat over the years though, Tokyo's Fantasyland is still very much the original version featuring the classic dark rides: Pinocchio, Snow White and Peter Pan are all virtually identical to the versions still operating in Paris, but it does feature a modern dark ride too - Pooh's Hunny Hunt uses a trackless system, and is much the sort of ride I was hoping Ratatouille would be - predominantly made up of physical scenes, lots going on and featuring a crazy room where loads of cars dance around a lot - what's not to love?

Tokyo has two further dark rides I'm unfamiliar with, Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin (unsurprisingly without any of the Warner characters featured in the film!) and Monsters Inc Ride and Go Seek, an interactive dark ride using torches instead of guns - much easier for young kids to aim at the various targets which bring the ride to life. The rides are also linked in that they feature very similar illusions to hide the route of the cars towards the end of the rides.

Most of the rest of the ride collection is standard Disney - Space Mountain is the same ride system as California and Hong Kong, whilst Splash is very similar to Florida's, albeit with a few tweaks to accommodate a redesigned queue and station. Pirates takes the end from Paris and puts it at the beginning, but it otherwise very similar (without the grand queue line, instead using the New Orleans theme of the US ones).

Haunted Mansion and Small World were both closed during our visit (but are probably much the same as the others!), whilst Grand Circuit Raceway (Autopia/Speedway) was being removed as part of the ongoing Fantasyland expansion, Star Jets (Orbitron/Astro Orbiter) was to close shortly after our trip, but we didn't ride due to the long queues.

One area where Tokyo has taken an existing ride and improved it is the railroad, which unlike at other Disney parks is purely a scenic ride, with only a single station built above the Jungle Cruise station (which isn't just a string of puns from start to finish). This fixes the capacity issues the ride suffers at other parks, as they don't have to worry about people staying on the train so can batch properly and load much faster - crucial with the vast number of guests the park attracts.

Speaking of which, the park was clearly running a policy of making as much fastpass available as possible. It makes it easier for people to get tickets, but plays havoc with the queues - Splash had a wait of 120+ minutes almost the entire time (which from what I could see appeared to be moving very slowly), and many rides seemed to be running at >50% fastpass. We timed Buzz Lightyear to ride during the castle show, and as a result the queue sped by as virtually no-one was using fastpass at the time. Star Tours was thankfully "standby" only, with an entirely respectable 25 minute queue the majority of the time, demonstrating just how much fastpass screws everything up when it's in operation. Even as a free system, I think I'd rather Disney just ditch fastpass and let the queues soak up more people for a given queue time, and have queues that move more quickly too.

On the whole I'm not sure where I'd rank TDL out of the 3 Disney castle parks I've done. Tokyo probably has the best collection of dark rides (or would have if they were all open), Florida has the most to do overall whilst Paris is a much more pleasant place to be - the difference between Tomorrowland (Tokyo or Florida) and Discoveryland is the most stark, but Fantasyland is also much more pleasant in Paris than Tokyo, and of course Paris has the best castle.

If aesthetics is one area TDL doesn't excel in, then that's hardly an accusation that can be thrown at Tokyo Disneysea next door, which would be the final park of our trip...
 
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