Revisiting Universal Studios Japan: Part Two (14/03/2024)

Emerging once again from the green pipe of Super Nintendo World just after 1pm, we set about trying to mop up the other activities we wanted to get done on an insanely busy USJ day. Much like our Disney days, this visit was impacted by hordes of students, with the only differences being the characters on their headbands and a reduction in school uniform-based outfits, so despite having another eight and a half hours to go, we knew that time would disappear quickly.

It had already been over 6 hours since we'd walked through these arches.

The Flying Dinosaur

After Super Nintendo World, our next biggest goal was getting on The Flying Dinosaur, the park’s famously intense B&M flying coaster. As we hadn’t opted for Express Pass, we knew the wait for The Flying Dinosaur was going to be stupidly long, so we had hoped to find a snack before joining the line. However, after a bit of wandering about Amity and the Jurassic Park area, we realised that not only were none of the queues for the food stalls sensible lengths, but what was on offer also sounded grim. I understand that big meaty turkey legs fit with the theme of big carnivorous dinosaurs, but we both would’ve rather have channelled our inner Diplodocuses and had a (non-existent) non-meat option. So, forgoing fuel for the queue, we gritted our teeth and accepted our two-hour wait time fate.

It's a good job The Flying Dinosaur is such an impressive coaster because its queue is the worst in the park by a mile. The whole thing is just a tangle of convoluted cattle-pens with no theming, no end in sight, and a single tv screen explaining the ride experience. It’s a real shame because the concept art for the queue line I saw online paints a very different picture, with lush greenery, props, and possibly even animatronics. Obviously, you expect a certain amount to be lost between early conceptualisation and implementation, but it’s disappointing that essentially nothing was brought forward.

The Flying Dinosaur was actually the one ride during our whole trip that I couldn’t wear my glasses for. I say “couldn’t” not because I had confirmation that I couldn’t, but because I couldn't be bothered to find out. The lockers for the ride are about 15 minutes before you board, before the metal detector arches and before a staircase up into the station, and the locker area is chaotic as guests flap about trying to find an available locker with minimal staff supervision. I therefore didn’t fancy trying to flag down a team member to ask about my glasses, or run the risk of getting up to the station only to be sent all the way back down into the chaos again to put them away. As a result, I didn’t get the best view of the ride, which is a shame because getting to look out at all the tiny ant people below is one of the joys of a flying coaster. However, with how intense some of the elements are on Flying Dinosaur, I wonder if it was wise not wearing them anyway; I wouldn’t have been surprised if my glasses had become permanently embedded in my eye sockets from the sheer forces.

The first drop of The Flying Dinosaur - I've heard from people with better eyesight that it's intimidating.

I would say, for me, that The Flying Dinosaur is bordering on too intense in places. I really enjoyed it, and the second half of the ride was delightfully swoopy, but towards the beginning (I’m assuming the pretzel loop and perhaps the raven in-turn – don’t ask me about coaster elements; I’m just here to go “wheee”), I felt like my body had all the structural integrity of tissue paper that was being scrunched up. Just give me airtime and speed; I don’t need to be compacted. Make no mistake however, I would still have happily ridden it again if it didn’t come with a two hour wait; it was overall relatively comfortable and beautifully smooth, and my squished organs bounced back from their near implosion perfectly fine.

The Crushing Inevitability of Pizza at Universal

We got dropped off by the Pteranodon at 3:15pm, so decided now was the time to get food or we would keel over in our next queue. We trudged about for what felt like an eternity getting increasingly anguished in search of adequate sustenance, but I knew deep in my heart, whether I liked it or not, it was all going to lead back to pizza. I have only been to a Universal park three times (USJ twice; Universal Orlando Resort once), but each time, the main meal of the day has been pizza, and two of those times, both in USJ and in Florida, it has been at Louie’s.

The issue with both parks, but especially USJ, is that all of the imaginative food options are locked behind a very long time-wall. If you’re not willing to make a meal part of the experience – and we had already done that for the day with Kinopio’s Café - your only option is going to be Louie’s. The pizza was fine, the cramped noisy dining space was fine for a theme park, but oh boy, would I love to not end up at a Louie’s around 3pm one visit for a change!

Paying Our Respects to Jaws

Next up on our list was Jaws, which I think had something like an 80-minute wait, but we used the single rider line and got on in 15 minutes. Single rider is a lifesaver on this ride, as there’s likely to be at least one free seat on each boat due to its large capacity, and in our case, we ended up on the same boat. We could’ve even sat next to each other as there was a free seat next to my friend still when we set sail, but I didn’t want to mess around with the ride host’s batching, and anyway, this meant we both got end seats with unobstructed views on one side.

Whilst I’m glad one of the original opening day rides is still present at USJ, essentially unchanged, I can’t say Jaws is my favourite ride, especially since it’s made or broken by the performance of your tour guide. It was good fun, and most, if not all, of the effects were working, as we got both wet and slightly roasted by the fireball at the end. However, I can’t tell if it was due to the strangely monotone delivery of our tour guide, but some of the timings felt a little off, especially towards the finale, and I’m not sure if the scorched shark made an appearance or not up front on the left side of the boat, or if it was just poorly signposted by the actor and soundtrack.

I’m pleased we rode it though, and I hope it remains as an oldie but a goodie that’s accessible both to people who can’t do coasters and those who vom on screen-based rides. It definitely had the best merch of the park too, and I was really taken with this goofy shark-with-human-legs headband. If I’d spotted it earlier in the day, I would’ve bought it and worn it around the park with pride. I hadn’t seen anyone else wearing it and it was at this point that I decided that no one in Osaka has good taste.

Harry Potter and the Excessively Long Queue Line

Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is one of my favourite Universal attractions, so we headed to the Wizarding World next, joining the queue for Forbidden Journey at 5:10pm. We didn’t stop to look around Hogsmeade or the area surrounding Hogwarts because the paths were painfully busy, as always, but we were stopped on our way by some other guests, for an interaction that feels oddly specific to USJ.

I remember when I visited USJ back in 2014 that at multiple points in the day we had teenagers waving at us whilst walking about, seemingly purely because we were foreigners. I chalked this up to it being a quiet day and Japan being slightly less of a common tourist destination than it is now, so foreigners in the park were more of a rarity. Whilst we didn’t get waved at, we were still noticed as foreigners, and we even got stopped by two girls in Hogsmeade who asked for a photo with us because they wanted to make friends with English-speakers. We had a chat for a minute and they seemed nice so we did take a photo with them, but I still don’t quite understand what they wanted out of the interaction. Were they hoping that we’d invite them to hang out with us or did they just want to briefly practice their English? In a quiet park with short ride wait times I might have asked them if they wanted to head with us to our next ride, but when you’re either committing to a two-hour queue or shuffling about a rammed shop, that’s an odd offer to make to strangers. I know a data set of two occasions isn’t much to go on, but I do wonder if there’s something in the air at USJ that makes young Japanese people want to interact with Westerners. Maybe it’s the American theming, or in this case, maybe it’s because we were Brits in Hogsmeade – essentially our natural habitat. If we hadn’t been so desperate to get to Forbidden Journey, perhaps we would have unravelled the mystery.  

In the queue we were blessed with a glimpse of the new Donkey Kong-themed coaster testing. I did post my grainy zoomed-out two-second footage on Twitter, as we hadn’t seen anyone post it testing before, but shockingly, internet fame and praise did not await me, and alas, Alicia Stella remains the queen of Universal updates. Funnily, I didn’t see any footage of the ride testing online for another 3 weeks or so, and videos were captioned to suggest the ride had only just then started testing, which was not the case. If it wasn’t already obvious, this makes it clear that you can’t always trust theme park news on social media! 

A glimpse of the Donkey Kong coaster during testing.

Forbidden Journey was actually even better than I remembered it from Orlando, with more effects working for me, including some spider spit that went straight in my eye (immersive!) I personally would rate it higher for enjoyment than both Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts and Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure. If I had to pick one screen-using ride in existence, this one would still be it, 14 years on from its creation, this is my favourite dark ride after Droomvlucht at Efteling.

A Dream Ride on Hollywood Dream: The Ride

We entered Hogwarts Castle at twilight and exited it in darkness, only getting off of Forbidden Journey a little bit past 7pm. I’m not sure how, but it took us an entire 40 minutes to get to our next and final attraction of the night, Hollywood Dream: The Ride. I rode Hollywood Dream back in 2014, early in the day, both the standard way round, and as Backdrop, where one train completes the course backwards. Unfortunately, I detested my first experience of this coaster; my restraint clunked significantly open on the first drop, and combined with not wearing my glasses on the ride, this made for an unnerving experience, so I spent the whole course hoping that I wasn’t about to die listening to Madonna’s ‘Holiday.’ Backdrop was somehow more enjoyable, but I still placed the forward-facing version of this coaster firmly in my bottom two coasters, alongside Colossus at Thorpe Park.

Hollywood Dream: The Ride rippling across the skyline earlier in the day.

I was willing to give it another shot however, as I had a sneaking suspicion that it would make for an excellent night ride and I’d just been unlucky, and thankfully I was right! I’m no Swiftie, but my choice of ‘Shake it Off’ from the song list worked perfectly with the ride, as it cruised past illuminated billboards and buildings, offering a genuinely fun if not incredibly thrilling experience. Hollywood Dream is a B&M hyper coaster, but it is the smallest in terms of height, and for coaster enthusiasts, it will come across as fairly tame. To get the most out of this one, I strongly recommend riding it at night – I came off of it grinning from ear to ear because it was just so fun. If you do intend to ride it at night, I would also recommend getting in line well ahead of park closure, as when we got off of the ride around 8:45pm, the queue closed a few minutes later. USJ is another Japanese park that shuts queues to have them cleared by around park close.

 

Hitting Up the Merch Stores   

Because of this, we didn’t have the opportunity to get in another ride before the end of the day. I had wanted to ride Flight of the Hippogriff not just for the cred but because I thought it would be another cute night ride, but we reckoned that by the time we got back to the Wizarding World, fighting against the crowds leaving, its queue would also be closed.

Instead, we decided to wade through the teenagers to check out the merchandise near the front of the park. I lost count of how many stores we browsed but, much like with Super Nintendo World, I wasn’t that impressed. Universal in Orlando has some park and ride-centred merch, although none of it appealed back in 2021, but USJ has almost none – and what it does have is downright dreadful. Headbands and oversized puffy hat-hoods of popular IPs are clearly the big seller, just like they are at Disney, so if you want anything to commemorate your time at USJ that you can wear in public without looking like a madwoman, you’re out of luck. There were a couple of hideous caps, t-shirts and assorted accessories, but there was no consistency even in the font used for the Universal logo, and the designs may as well have been knocked together using Word Art. Unsurprisingly, we both left these shops souvenir-less.

Toad hats were one of the most popular/prominent souvenir choices.

Final Thoughts on Universal Studios Japan

Summarising my feelings towards USJ is difficult because, despite spending 14 hours in the park, it felt mostly like a manic blur, with just the calm oasis of Kinopio’s Café near the start. USJ on a busy day feels like an insurmountable wave of television static; you can’t discern anything because so many people are scurrying about, and your only respite is those scarce minutes on its beautifully crafted rides. Since visiting I’ve seen videos of people interacting with magical creatures in the Wizarding World and I’ve noticed on the map that there’s Hagrid’s Hut round the back of Flight of the Hippogriff, but none of these experience-enriching elements felt within our reach because we didn’t have the time – or the physical space – to see them. Sadly, the only area of the park where you can stop to appreciate your surroundings is New York, which is now a ghost town with the permanent closure of The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man earlier this year. Peer down its streets and all you’ll see is girls doing their makeup in a quiet corner or filming dance routines, whilst a few boys try to have a nap on a doorstep.

This photo manages to make the New York area look busier than it was.

It's odd because I don’t feel like I had a bad day at USJ, even though it was draining and we only got on six rides across 14 hours, but I didn’t come away feeling any positive emotion for the park itself. I enjoyed the rides, but in contrast to somewhere like Efteling, Phantasialand, or heck, even Thorpe Park, I left with no affection for the space those rides occupy. I think the fact that the park is inextricably IP-based doesn’t help, since I prefer my parks to craft their own stories as I personally find it more immersive, but I did enjoy that first visit. I can only then think that a large part of my ambivalence stems from the ridiculous volume of guests the park entertains these days. I know USJ will never be piggy-back-riding-your-friends-through-San-Francisco quiet again, but I do wish that USJ would reduce its attendance so that guests can truly appreciate the genuinely incredible work that has gone into bringing the films (and games) it celebrates to life.