Japan 2023 day 8: SUPER NINTENDO WORLD!
When Super Nintendo World was first announced and being built at Universal Studios Japan, Jerry and I geeked out watching the videos, and declared we had to visit the next time we went to Japan. We planned part of our trip around it, and booked tickets a couple months in advance. As it’s still the newest part of the park, USJ even promotes it right in the front gate:
We got in around 10am, but had a timed entry for 11 at Nintendo, so we wandered Universal for a bit to orient ourselves. The first thing we noticed was how crazy packed it was, with long lines everywhere. Even the rides had multiple hour waits (230 minutes?!) at that time in the morning:
And the food vendors were just as bad. We realized getting a churro was not gonna happen, unless one of us could stomach a 30-40 minute line. On the plus side, we found the little kids area had Peanuts (well, Snoopy), sesame street, and hello kitty stuff. And an army of tiny children.
It turns out the end of March is also the 2-week gap between school years in Japan (the year starts in April), and we went to a theme park when kids were done or had half days at school (exam season, I guess). Oops.
Our circling also took us past Jaws (Amity?) like 3 times, as well as briefly touring Jurassic Park and San Francisco, giving us an idea of what we could visit in the afternoon.
Finally, it was time! After showing our tickets, we bought wristbands to activate the coin blocks, mini games, and to track our scores. I decided on Yoshi (nearly went for Luigi, but Yosh is my boy), and Jerry opted for the limited edition golden Mario one:
There are multiple vendors both inside and outside Super Nintendo World selling these power up bands. If the first one you see has a long line, you'll easily find another station nearby possibly with a shorter line.
Our first ride was Mario Kart: Koopa’s Challenge (Koopa is the Japanese name for Bowser). Before heading in, we luckily discovered they were handing out reservation times (on slips of paper) for the cafe, and snagged 2pm before it ran out. One tip we have is that if you're planning on wanting to eat at the restaurant here, go immediately to the cafe and pick up a timed ticket entry, so that you won't have to wait a couple of hours until your entry time.
Anyway, back to Koopa’s Challenge, in the waiting area, it’s set up as Bowser’s workshop, and it’s almost (but not really) a shame we had express passes and couldn’t spend more time admiring the displays.
The ride itself is a blast! The AR honestly was a bit overwhelming, especially with the narrow field of view. I had to swivel my head constantly to look for Koopa troopers and other enemies to fire shells at. Search YouTube for a video if you want to see what I mean.
We then went to Yoshi’s island. As a ride-or-die Yoshi fan, I was initially very excited… but the ride is a bit underwhelming, unfortunately. The only challenge is to match egg colors with buttons at your seat, and unless you’re colorblind it’s not much of a game. The ride itself is a casual glide through some neat animatronics, recreating some of the platformer classics, and I did appreciate that.
After the ride, we had an hour to kill before our lunch, which meant souvenir shopping. We considered a few headgear options, but ultimately Jerry just bought a Chef Toad headband. From this point onward, Super Nintendo World employees kept complimenting him on his cute “Kinopio” headband, with way too much enthusiasm.
And then we discovered the minigames!! If you’ve played Warioware or Mario party, you know what to expect here. They varied in difficulty and fun, but they’re all worth trying; definitely leave yourself lots of time to explore those if you go to the park. For some games, they paired us up with small kids, and we made sure we won as a team, so those kids were happy (and in one case one of the kids saved us from defeat!).
Once you’ve beat 3 or more games (there are 6), you can play the “secret” game to rescue the golden mushroom. Our cohort won, again, with Jerry getting the highest score in the group. Note that we did hear people lose games; you hear the iconic “death” song from the original Super Mario game.
With perfect timing, it was exactly 2pm when we got our mushroom, so we headed into Kinopio’s cafe for lunch, and also to get out of the rain. Kinopio, we learned, is the Japanese name for Toadstool, Mario’s faithful companion in the mushroom kingdom. And the theme is that he’s the chef. The place is decked out in the style of mushroom kingdom, with videos playing on a bunch of walls. At one point a Bowser airship attacked the cafe and cannon balls flew from one screen to the next.
Also, the food was super cute:
We had to leave to make our other timed rides at the park, and we felt pretty fulfilled at this point. As I said, we only went to Universal for Mario, so anything else we did was just gravy. The next thing on our itinerary was at Harry Potter, so we found our way to Hogsmeade. The whole place looks amazing… and was packed elbow to elbow with people, unfortunately, and still a little rainy.
On the plus side, we had a timed entry to the 4D ride in Hogwart, and not gonna lie, it was amazing!! Unless you’re prone to motion sickness like Jerry… Also, the dialog features all the Potter cast, but with Japanese voices, which was kinda trippy.
Right afterwards, we took some deep breaths and walked back and forth for a minute to recover before hopping on the Hippogriff coaster. It was a fun but incredibly short ride.
I kinda wanted butterbeer, but the lines were constantly overwhelming:
Finally, we wandered back out into the rest of the park, and explored. Our bundle included express passes for two more rides: spiderman (at any time) and Hollywood Dream at 6pm. I wanted to make use of what I could, so I rode spiderman real quick while Jerry waited outside to avoid getting motion sick again. It was okay, but like a second-class version of what we’d just done at Hogwarts.
We took a few last photos of fun Minions stuff and grabbed a milk tea at Gong Cha before heading back.
For dinner, we didn’t have anything planned, but there was an interesting ramen place around the corner from our hotel, so we tried it out. It was the kind of place where you have to order from a machine, and the menu was entirely in Japanese. Unlike our first trip to Japan 15 years ago, this time we had Google Translate to help us!
The ramen had the thickest, richest broth either of us have ever tried, and was almost too much flavor. Tell Guy Fieri that “flavortown” has nothing on this!
That’s all for Tuesday; soon we’ll share the rest of our fun explorations while we were based in Osaka!
