John
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Steel Vengeance
Continuing my occasional series of trip reports from park’s I’ve visited whilst travelling with work, one of our current jobs has required me to be in Nagoya for the past two weeks. With Nagashima Spa Land just down the road, it would be crazy not to visit.
There are several options to get to the park by public transport from various cities in the region. The direct bus from Nagoya Meitetsu bus terminal takes about 50min and runs frequently, so was the logical choice for us, we were lucky to get some of the last seats on the bus in both directions, but at busier times you’d probably have to wait longer. We arrived at the park at about 9.20 for a 9.30 opening, and there was already a long queue to get in. They hold guests back from the entrance plaza, so unless you already have a ticket there’s no way to get one until opening time, but the process was efficient and by about 9.45 we were in.
Naturally, Steel Dragon 2000 was the first port of call. Having seen a video of the new B&M trains a couple of years ago, I was concerned about poor operations. The ride is far from efficiently run, but not as bad as I’d feared. It runs 2 trains, and the first generally waits for around 30s on the break run for the other to be dispatched. The main hold-up is the bag store system, which requires absolutely everything in your possession to go into a locker on the offload side, which takes a while. The actual restraint checking process was fairly smooth, with 4 staff, but dispatching is then delayed by a pre-start safety announcement given by one of the platform staff, who are mic-ed up. Cedar Point do a similar thing, but save time by giving the safety spiel during restraint checks rather than after.
As for the ride itself, watching it test in the morning I wasn’t expecting greatness. Certainly on the first big hills airtime is minimal, but the sheer size results in staggering raw speed. After the main hills, there’s a long series of high speed turns, packed with extended positive gs before the ride changes character again with an extended series of low hills, again not a lot of airtime to be had but still hugely fun. Despite the lack of airtime compared with other hypers, I was hugely impresses with Steel Dragon. The ride is extremely long with a lot of variety, with 3 key sections: big hills, high speed turnaround, small hills. It might even find a place in my top 20!
Moving on past SD2K you’ll find one of the rare Togo Ultratwisters. It’s always a little concerning when a low capacity ride is walk on, especially when you already suspect it might be horrendous, but Ultra Twister (as it’s imaginatively named) is actually OK. Sure, the initial horizontal to vertical switch track and subsequent vertical lift are extremely unsettling, but the initial section is rather fun. The backwards section isn’t quite as well designed, with a rather alarming mini-drop between the two twists, but still a decent ride on the whole.
On the same side of the park is Acrobat, a clone of Manta in Florida. This version was running 2 stations/2 trains, and it appears that it doesn’t run (or doesn’t have) 3 trains due to the bag store arrangement which requires you to exit on the same side you board to recover loose items (which are left prior to boarding). The ride itself is much like Manta, with the crazy pretzel loop somewhat detracting from most of the layout beyond which, whilst good, cannot hope to compare with such an intense start. One slight criticism would be that the ride borrows a little too much from Manta, with a very similar train design and even a water splash in the same location as its US counterpart.
On the opposite side of the park is the other major coaster, White Cyclone. This wooden coaster from Intamin is hugely impressive in scale, but isn’t really a particularly good ride. The coaster is very long, but spends a lot of its layout bouncing round very long elevated curves with only a few drops and little airtime to speak of. The ride, whilst very rough, is never really painful but it’s not exactly pleasant either.
To avoid an overly long report, here’s a summary of the other coasters:
Looping Star – Schwarzkopf looping star. I’ve never been on one of these before, but done 2 of the smaller Silver Arrows. Good ride but a little short - could do with a helix at the end.
Shuttle Loop – Schwarzkopf shuttle loop. This is the flywheel version rather than the weight drop of Thunderlooper, not that it makes much difference. This one didn’t trim as much as Gold Reef City’s Golden Loop when passing backwards through the station.
Jet Coaster – An ancient Togo (exact age unknown). Imagine if Brunel had tried to design a roller coaster, and you’re probably half way to picturing this thing. All things considered, a pretty fun family coaster.
Children’s coaster – Tivoli medium, and an old one at that with brakes and restraint release operated manually by massive levers.
Wild Mouse – A pair of Mack wild mice. We only rode one side as there’s not a lot of point in doing both. The first bit was good, but overtrimmed thereafter.
Corkscrew (the Arrow version rather than Vekoma) was closed, presumably due to construction of the new S&S Free Spin
The park also has a huge collection of flat rides, including a lot of tower rides and various swing rides:
Space Shot – S&S triple tower rides. Only 1 was running all day, and only in Shot mode. I’m not sure if the others operate different cycles.
Free Fall – Intamin 1st gen drop tower. Running 3 cars but only loading 3 per cycle, so a slow moving queue. These things really don’t feel safe – there’s so many transfers and mechanisms compared with modern tower rides and I can’t quite believe Intamin managed to get it to work with any degree of reliability.
Space Shuttle – Looping pirate ship, didn’t ride this one but I imagine it’s probably very unpleasant as all inverting pirate ship style rides seem to be.
Viking – set of 3 pirate ships, one small and twin giant ships. Again, didn’t ride but it didn’t seem to swing very high.
Frisbee – standard Huss Frisbee
Giant Frisbee – Huss Giant Frisbee
Most of these rides ran either poor or short cycles (sometimes both), despite most of them being either walk on or otherwise having very short queues. The Giant Frisbee in particular was rather disappointing as it only made about 2 swings at full height, which seemed a bit of a waste.
There’s also a pair of powered bob rides (same ride system as Toverland’s Maximus Blitz Bahn), a Zierer Jet Ski and a range of other family/thrill flat rides, most of which I didn’t ride as time was tight even on a quiet day. For a park with a lot of rides, one area they seem to be lacking in is water rides, there’s a giant flume (which was closed) and a tiny kiddy log flume, but not a standard flume or rapids.
On the whole it’s a pretty solid park, with a couple of top-drawer coasters and a large range of support rides. It’s probably a bit of a misery if it’s even vaguely busy, but well worth a visit if you’re in the area.
There are several options to get to the park by public transport from various cities in the region. The direct bus from Nagoya Meitetsu bus terminal takes about 50min and runs frequently, so was the logical choice for us, we were lucky to get some of the last seats on the bus in both directions, but at busier times you’d probably have to wait longer. We arrived at the park at about 9.20 for a 9.30 opening, and there was already a long queue to get in. They hold guests back from the entrance plaza, so unless you already have a ticket there’s no way to get one until opening time, but the process was efficient and by about 9.45 we were in.
Naturally, Steel Dragon 2000 was the first port of call. Having seen a video of the new B&M trains a couple of years ago, I was concerned about poor operations. The ride is far from efficiently run, but not as bad as I’d feared. It runs 2 trains, and the first generally waits for around 30s on the break run for the other to be dispatched. The main hold-up is the bag store system, which requires absolutely everything in your possession to go into a locker on the offload side, which takes a while. The actual restraint checking process was fairly smooth, with 4 staff, but dispatching is then delayed by a pre-start safety announcement given by one of the platform staff, who are mic-ed up. Cedar Point do a similar thing, but save time by giving the safety spiel during restraint checks rather than after.
As for the ride itself, watching it test in the morning I wasn’t expecting greatness. Certainly on the first big hills airtime is minimal, but the sheer size results in staggering raw speed. After the main hills, there’s a long series of high speed turns, packed with extended positive gs before the ride changes character again with an extended series of low hills, again not a lot of airtime to be had but still hugely fun. Despite the lack of airtime compared with other hypers, I was hugely impresses with Steel Dragon. The ride is extremely long with a lot of variety, with 3 key sections: big hills, high speed turnaround, small hills. It might even find a place in my top 20!
Moving on past SD2K you’ll find one of the rare Togo Ultratwisters. It’s always a little concerning when a low capacity ride is walk on, especially when you already suspect it might be horrendous, but Ultra Twister (as it’s imaginatively named) is actually OK. Sure, the initial horizontal to vertical switch track and subsequent vertical lift are extremely unsettling, but the initial section is rather fun. The backwards section isn’t quite as well designed, with a rather alarming mini-drop between the two twists, but still a decent ride on the whole.
On the same side of the park is Acrobat, a clone of Manta in Florida. This version was running 2 stations/2 trains, and it appears that it doesn’t run (or doesn’t have) 3 trains due to the bag store arrangement which requires you to exit on the same side you board to recover loose items (which are left prior to boarding). The ride itself is much like Manta, with the crazy pretzel loop somewhat detracting from most of the layout beyond which, whilst good, cannot hope to compare with such an intense start. One slight criticism would be that the ride borrows a little too much from Manta, with a very similar train design and even a water splash in the same location as its US counterpart.
On the opposite side of the park is the other major coaster, White Cyclone. This wooden coaster from Intamin is hugely impressive in scale, but isn’t really a particularly good ride. The coaster is very long, but spends a lot of its layout bouncing round very long elevated curves with only a few drops and little airtime to speak of. The ride, whilst very rough, is never really painful but it’s not exactly pleasant either.
To avoid an overly long report, here’s a summary of the other coasters:
Looping Star – Schwarzkopf looping star. I’ve never been on one of these before, but done 2 of the smaller Silver Arrows. Good ride but a little short - could do with a helix at the end.
Shuttle Loop – Schwarzkopf shuttle loop. This is the flywheel version rather than the weight drop of Thunderlooper, not that it makes much difference. This one didn’t trim as much as Gold Reef City’s Golden Loop when passing backwards through the station.
Jet Coaster – An ancient Togo (exact age unknown). Imagine if Brunel had tried to design a roller coaster, and you’re probably half way to picturing this thing. All things considered, a pretty fun family coaster.
Children’s coaster – Tivoli medium, and an old one at that with brakes and restraint release operated manually by massive levers.
Wild Mouse – A pair of Mack wild mice. We only rode one side as there’s not a lot of point in doing both. The first bit was good, but overtrimmed thereafter.
Corkscrew (the Arrow version rather than Vekoma) was closed, presumably due to construction of the new S&S Free Spin
The park also has a huge collection of flat rides, including a lot of tower rides and various swing rides:
Space Shot – S&S triple tower rides. Only 1 was running all day, and only in Shot mode. I’m not sure if the others operate different cycles.
Free Fall – Intamin 1st gen drop tower. Running 3 cars but only loading 3 per cycle, so a slow moving queue. These things really don’t feel safe – there’s so many transfers and mechanisms compared with modern tower rides and I can’t quite believe Intamin managed to get it to work with any degree of reliability.
Space Shuttle – Looping pirate ship, didn’t ride this one but I imagine it’s probably very unpleasant as all inverting pirate ship style rides seem to be.
Viking – set of 3 pirate ships, one small and twin giant ships. Again, didn’t ride but it didn’t seem to swing very high.
Frisbee – standard Huss Frisbee
Giant Frisbee – Huss Giant Frisbee
Most of these rides ran either poor or short cycles (sometimes both), despite most of them being either walk on or otherwise having very short queues. The Giant Frisbee in particular was rather disappointing as it only made about 2 swings at full height, which seemed a bit of a waste.
There’s also a pair of powered bob rides (same ride system as Toverland’s Maximus Blitz Bahn), a Zierer Jet Ski and a range of other family/thrill flat rides, most of which I didn’t ride as time was tight even on a quiet day. For a park with a lot of rides, one area they seem to be lacking in is water rides, there’s a giant flume (which was closed) and a tiny kiddy log flume, but not a standard flume or rapids.
On the whole it’s a pretty solid park, with a couple of top-drawer coasters and a large range of support rides. It’s probably a bit of a misery if it’s even vaguely busy, but well worth a visit if you’re in the area.
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