Japan 2023, day 4, Super Nintendo Land and more

Not a bad 8 hours of sleep last night. Up a little early, but still, 8 hours! Today we plan on hitting Universal Studios Japan from open to close, 9am-8pm.

The hotel includes a pretty extensive breakfast buffet and the food was great.

We went to stand in line at the park entrance round 8:15am. We headed right over to the primary destination of the day, Super Nintendo World.

The land is meant to feel like you’ve walked into a video game. It certainly accomplishes its goal.

Watch this little slide show to get more of a sense of the theming.

We grabbed “power up bands” which allowed us to punch underneath blocks, play little challenges and ride the rides all to collect coins…like you would in a video game. The “score” was kept in a phone app.

There are two rides in this part of the park, Yoshi’s Adventure and Mario Kart: Koopa’s Challenge. The first is a kids ride that was pretty but thats about it. Mario Kart is where the fun was. Based on the video game of the same name this ride combines practical sets and virtual graphics projected in a small clear plastic visor you wear as you “drive” a cart racing against the bad guy, Bowser.

We ended up riding it multiple times. I believe I got the best score between the two of us. You’ll have to ask Mike. It’s a bit of a sore subject…

We spent over 6 hours riding rides, doing challenges and buying special popcorn holders. See Mike with his yellow star popcorn holder above.

We left Mario world and headed to the Jurassic Park ride which is a big water flume ride where you end up going down a substantial drop to escape the T-Rex. Fun drop, the rest of the ride is showing it’s age.

From there we went to a kids land featuring Snoopy, Hello Kitty, and Sesame Street themed kids rides. We did the spinning Hello Kitty Cupcakes and the Elmo Go Go Skateboard ride. Both were lame and fun at the same time.

We then did the most intense coaster at the park, The Hollywood Dreams coaster. No upside down parts but it drops from pretty high and goes damned fast. The reverse helix (see video below) nearly greyed us out. Good ride and you got to choose one of 5 songs to listen to while riding.

We were both getting tired so we thought we’d do one more go on the Harry Potter Ride if the line wasn’t too long. On our way there we saw that there was a wand choosing ceremony at Ollivander’s (if you’re a Harry Potter fan you’ll know what I’m talking about.) We went into Ollivander’s shop with 8 or 9 other people and a 7 year old kid was chosen to choose his wand, or really, to have the wand choose him. Like the book and movie the kid goes through a couple of wands before he finds one that makes the room light up (cue John William’s score from the movie franchise). The wand found the kid. And Mike and I both teared up.

After that we walked right on to the Harry Potter ride and then headed out of the park.

We didn’t eat dinner yet and I wanted to try this sushi restaurant I saw in a video on YouTube. You order from an iPad at the table and the sushi is delivered via conveyor belt to your table. (See the video below.)

It was fun and delicious.

We went to Lawson’s and got some Pocky for dessert. Stick some chopsticks in us, we are done.

Thanks for following along!