Today after breakfast I set out to visit Universal Studios Osaka.
I’m absolutely having a blast here!
I’ll try to sum up a bit what I did, but most rides really need to be experienced in person:
– Jaws. You take place in a boat, and the captain shows you around the place. Everything is all good, until you get a visit from Jaws! The captain starts panicking, gets his shotgun out and trees to kill him off. Sadly he isn’t the best gunman, so you spend several minutes being chased by the shark while the captain destroys everything but the shark itself. Although I didn’t understand much of the story being told, the effects and explosions were great.!
– Jurassic Park the ride. Another boat ride (sort of) , but this time through Jurassic Park. The Dino’s were a bit cheesy, probably made like 20 years ago. It was more thrilling than Jaws though, since here you actually ascended and descended with a huge splash. While in the waiting line being the first to go next, the operator pulled me aside and let someone else go first, afterwards he assigned me a special seat in the back. Little did I know this was the spot where you would get the wettest… Luckily the weather was great, so it was a welcome surprise.
– Spiderman the ride. Here a 3d Spiderman (glasses were needed) guides you through the city, but he didn’t do a good job locking up all the baddies, since there were still on the loose trying to get us.
It was a bit like a rollercoaster with lots of turning, rotating, crashing and what not. In the end the Spiderman saved the day again and we could leave the ride.
– Space Fantasy. Something about collecting stardust (which was done by mashing buttons on the cart) in carts which could also spin around. I had no idea what was going on, but the ride was awesome!
– Hollywood the ride. The main rollercoaster of Osaka Universal Studios. There are four trains, of which one goes backwards. Good thing I could ride the backwards one!
The great thing about these rides is they have three lines: normal, express and single.
The normal line is for couples and friends, express for when you’ve payed extra money and the single line if you don’t care who sits next to you. Getting on the single line will skip a lot of waiting time: instead of waiting 120 minutes (which was indicated for the normal line on Hollywood the ride) I had to wait for about 30!
An hour ago I went to the temporary Harry Potter section of the park.
You had to make a reservation to enter this part in advance, because it’s probably the busiest spot in the park.
I only snapped a few pictures there, the waiting time for the shops were absurd, and the two rides there (no single row here 🙁 ) had a waiting time of 180 minutes. Luckily I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan, so I had no problem skipping these.
(to be honest, the rollercoaster there looked a bit lame)
Now today Halloween also starts in the park.
in about 30 minutes there will be some kind of zombie outbreak, hopefully I’ll make it out alive…