Joypolis and Letting Go of Eejanaika (12/03/2024)

Was this queue at Joypolis better than standing in a wet, closed theme park? Yes, but not by much.

We tried so hard to visit Fuji Q Highland. One of those parks that coaster enthusiasts all make the begrudging pilgrimage to, and yet never seem to have a good time at, we knew we needed to try to go to Fuji Q Highland whether we liked it or not. We would not have a good time; we would have an obligatory time.

One of the (many) things that gives Fuji Q its terrible reputation is the way in which all the rides shut down with a speck of rain. Leaving aside whether this is necessary or not from a ride safety perspective, it boggles the mind that an outdoor thrill park would be set up in an area that seems to have the moistest of micro-climates. We therefore knew we needed to visit on a mild, dry day with low winds, and I set about monitoring the weather forecast to try to position our Fuji Q attempt on a favourable day.

Shortly before our trip, I noticed our proposed Fuji Q day, on the last full day of our holiday, had a heavy rain forecast, along with the days surrounding it, so we took the plunge and moved our second DisneySea day to that last day, reasoning that DisneySea can function in the rain, but Fuji Q cannot. This didn’t take too much effort in the Tokyo Disney Resort app, but we did end up paying a few more pounds for our DisneySea tickets as a result, as our original tickets were in a lower price band. No matter, we would be experiencing the enthusiast’s holy grail: Eejanaika.

We then began the excruciating process of trying to book tickets and transportation. We spent an inordinate amount of time being gaslit by the Fuji Q official website. “We recommend you set up a club member’s account to buy tickets more smoothly!” No thank you, Fuji Q, I’m only visiting the once! Five minutes later, after inputting a bunch of personal data and picking tickets: “You need to set up a club member account to buy tickets.” Why didn’t you just say that?! So, after setting up my club member account (thank you for the constant marketing emails, Fuji Q), we picked our combi admission and express bus tickets, chose our bus times and seats, and…an error occurred. Huh, that’s funny, I’ve got my card’s security code wrong. I’ll put it in again. Oh, silly me, I got it wrong again! Wait – every time I submit the form, the website changes my security code by one digit! And so, after about an hour of faffing, trying different cards, and different combinations of tickets, logging in over and over again as the site kicks you out after a few minutes, we gave up on buying Fuji Q tickets directly through their cursed website, and researched our options.

In desperation, I signed up to the omnipresent third-party ticket seller Klook, before realising that their bus only runs if a minimum number of people show up for it. Would a whole bus of foreigners be going to Fuji Q in chilly March? We didn’t want to find out. We then tracked down another bus company that stopped at Fuji Q, and spent over £20 each on bus tickets (only afterwards seeing the warning that Brits and Europeans were not allowed to use their services for GDPR reasons…) This whole process was like pulling teeth, and we hadn’t even secured park tickets.

Fast forward to us getting to Japan and the back end of our trip was no longer going to be rainy…but the start of it would be. As we stood in DisneySea on the Monday, we could see that Fuji Q’s Tuesday forecast was around a high of 6 degrees Celsius, 100% chance of (heavy) precipitation, and it was all going to be slap-bang in the middle of the day over seven hours.

It was at this point that we had to make the painful decision to let Eejanaika go. Neither of us were convinced we were necessarily going to enjoy a trip to Fuji Q anyway; we were both sleep-deprived and physically fragile, so the thought of a two-hour bus journey to either stand in front of a bunch of closed rides, or get whipped about into musculoskeletal oblivion, was not very appealing.

Searching for the Joy in Joypolis

Instead, we decided to treat Tuesday as a slow day, making Odaiba’s Joypolis the low-stakes focal point of our excursion. Joypolis was already on our radar and we had been trying to find somewhere to slot it in, and a rainy day seemed as good a day as any to go to an indoor entertainment centre.

Except, of course, every other person in Tokyo also thought an indoor entertainment centre would be a good idea on a torrentially rainy day. We again made the mistake of not arriving at opening time (11am): it took us a while to find breakfast near our hotel in Asakusa, so we only ended up in Odaiba around 12:30pm. It was a great breakfast though! We were kicking ourselves that we hadn’t discovered Bakery & Café Yamazaki, a ten-minute walk from our hotel, until this point, as it had a huge range of Japanese and European-influenced baked foods, and a nice quiet seating area upstairs to eat in, with self-serve iced water.

Matcha melon pan and curry pan was breakfast; bee-shaped bread got squished in my bag and put out of its misery later.

Back at Odaiba, we briefly stopped off outside Madame Tussauds Tokyo, which is in the same building as Joypolis. I used to work for Madame Tussauds London, so I was interested to see such a far-flung sister location. Sadly, I can’t say their business is looking too healthy: their entrance is deserted, still using the old global branding that should have been replaced years ago, and you could only buy tickets and gain entry through the Legoland Discovery Centre next door, which seemed equally abandoned. Once we got to it, Joypolis in the same building was absolutely heaving with tourists, so it really stood out that these two Merlin attractions had no trade. Clearly, they don’t hold the appeal to foreign tourists that Joypolis does.

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This is not entirely surprising as Joypolis is that classic ‘wacky futuristic Japan’ tourist trap. Opened by Sega in 1996, Joypolis was part of that wave of arcade and simulator entertainment centres of the 90s, that have largely now come to pass. Joypolis ironically struck me as an overly-touristy, lifeless version of its own offshoot SegaWorld London in Trocadero (if any of my readers are even old enough to have heard stories of its heyday). It may seem odd to describe a place rammed full of people as lifeless, but the place had little energy and no authenticity. The arcade/crane game selection was disappointing – you didn’t get a sense of there being any arcade culture here; no regulars who knew the tricks of each machine.

Instead, Joypolis was just a bunch of foreign tourists looking dazed amongst Japanese teens, overwhelmed by the incessant noise and volume of people, making everything worth doing a 90-minute queue. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear this is what awaits you before entering, as they don’t post the ride wait times outside the entrance, so tourists hoping to kill a couple of hours buy the all-day ride pass (not exactly cheap at 5000 yen – over £26), and then realise they can’t do anything with the time they have unless they buy a fast pass. We did see a few bitter-looking western tourists do just this, having already sunk enough money into the visit.

Gekion Live Coaster

We decided to stick it out, opting instead to just buy the admission pass (900 yen/£4.80 with foreigner discount) and pay per ride. Once inside, we found a machine to buy tickets for Gekion Live Coaster (1000 yen/£5.26 - cash only), the centre’s 2012 Gerstlauer spinning coaster with a rhythm game twist, and we resigned ourselves to the 90-minute queue. The queue would’ve felt quicker if it wasn’t for the presence of a screen/projection setup that blasted out birthday announcements and songs by the terrible mascot Lopit, a pink-haired frenetic virtual idol – a poor man’s Ulala from Dreamcast game Space Channel 5. Lopit’s broadcasts were eardrum-piercingly loud, so as someone with already severe tinnitus due to lasting damage from theme park music, I spent a lot of time miserably getting out my earplugs.

Once we got to Gekion Live Coaster itself, it was actually pretty decent! I was able to wear my glasses, so I could actually engage with the rhythm game portion of the ride, themed to the unholy pairing of Lopit and Sonic the Hedgehog, and shown on screens that moved ahead of our vehicle. Out of our four competitors, I actually managed to win the game, which definitely artificially boosted this ride in my coaster rankings! Everyone gets a letter ranking as well to motivate you to try harder next time, so I can see this being a fun repeat ride on quiet days.

In terms of the coaster element itself, excluding time slowly moving between screens, this starts with a weak launch and lasts about 35 seconds with one inversion and a fair amount of spinning. The ride had at least one turn that jarred my neck pretty badly, but it was relatively smooth overall. I was pleasantly surprised by Gekion Live, but I went in with very low expectations, seeing it as a gimmick ride, so I would recommend others to do the same. I’m glad I rode it, but it was by no means worth a 90-minute wait.

Only about another 30 minutes to go...

Rides Gifted by Kind Strangers

After Gekion Live, we went over to Halfpipe Tokyo to stare at it, forlornly in my case, as I had desperately wanted to go on this ride, but neither of us could face another 90-minute wait. I stood there timing how long it took for them to load the eight guests in each cycle, and it was something like more than three and a half minutes, so we abandoned any thought of experiencing this unique ride model, which simulates riding a skateboard on a large scale. A product of Sega’s now-defunct ‘amusement machine’ division and again originating in the 90s arcade/simulator boom, all other iterations of this ride have now sadly closed. Although a refurbished and significantly plussed version of the original ride, Halfpipe Canyon, watching Halfpipe Tokyo made me feel nostalgic for a time when simulators and their like excited arcade-goers.

As we side-stepped around the crowds looking for something else to do, an American couple, looking incredibly exasperated, approached us and handed over their all-day ride passes. Judging by the time of purchase on the tickets, they probably hadn’t even done a single ride.

The two rides we got out of this couple’s kind gesture were Spicy Taxi and Mystic Mansion: Tale of Pandemonium (Spirit House: Edo Night Parade of One Hundred Demons in Japanese). We waited about 10 minutes for each, either getting on the next ride cycle, or the one after, so not everything at Joypolis is queue purgatory. Spicy Taxi is a souped-up arcade game, seating you and up to three other players on your team inside a tuk-tuk, racing against up to four other tuk-tuks. During the game, you have to dodge and scare away wild animals, and sometimes answer pop quizzes with no theme to them whatsoever. It was fun enough, as the tuk-tuks turn and pitch forward to simulate the environment you’re driving through, but it’s still just an arcade game that would set you back 600 yen (£3.15) for about five minutes of bewildering gameplay, and we only really went on it because it had a funny name.

Mystic Mansion was the only other ride at Joypolis I was actively interested in; a 4D spinning theatre themed to the Japanese folklore concept of a supernatural procession of demons and spirits at night – in this case, all trying to get into the traditional Japanese house you’re in. The 3D didn’t work too well with my astigmatism, but the other effects were fun and one caught me by surprise a little, so I’d say it’s one of the better 4D theatres I’ve done. It was also refreshing to do a screen-based ride that wasn’t burdened with an obligatory intellectual property; the theme was one that would be familiar to a Japanese audience, but its appeal wasn’t hanging on a brand name. This would have cost us 700 yen/£3.68, which I would say is very well-priced. 

The entrance sign for Mystic Mansion: Tale of Pandemonium.

Before making our exit, we had a quick go on one of the arcade machines and always a favourite of mine, Taiko no Tatsujin, the drumming rhythm game, which required coin payment separate to admission. After our turn, we stuck around to help two American kids set up their game since all the menus are in Japanese, thereby passing on some of the kindness we’d experienced ourselves.

On the way out, I picked up a nice, small tin of what I think are UK-style mini Smarties-like sweets with a cute design of Gekion Live being ridden by Joypolis’ mascot, Joypoli-kun, on it, but most of the gift shop is just anime-themed goods and Sega merch.

Exploring DECKS Tokyo Beach

We left some time around 3:30pm, choosing to spend an hour or so in the DECKS Tokyo Beach mall Joypolis is situated in. I bought some old-fashioned Japanese sweets my mum is fond of in the retro-styled shopping area, that was also filled with 80s and 90s arcade machines and overwhelming amounts of old-school J-pop idol ephemera. Finally, we were bamboozled by the “Takoyaki Museum.” I had hoped that this was an earnest look at the history of doughy octopus balls, but no, “museum” in Japan can just mean “a bunch of shops on a theme.” As we’d taken the time to find the “Takoyaki Museum,” we ate some fairly awful takoyaki from one of the food outlets contained within, Dotonbori Akaoni. I adore takoyaki, but these were not great. Japanese guests seemed to be having a whale of time though, so maybe they picked better than us. 

Around 5pm, we headed back to our base in Asakusa, thoroughly exhausted from our afternoon at Joypolis and DECKS. The space is loud, abrasive, and when jam-packed, only semi-enjoyable, so whilst I’d recommend visiting Joypolis to experience Gekion Live Coaster and Halfpipe Tokyo at the very least, try to not pick a rainy day.