Super Nintendo World Exceeded Every Expectation I Had Going In There

On my recent holiday to Japan, which I took with my wife and two teenage kids, the process of choosing what we were going to do each day followed a pretty simple rule: not everything we did was going to be for everyone.

If I dragged everyone shopping one morning, for example, I couldn't complain when I had to go do something I didn't like. And over the course of our two-week vacation, there was nothing I was looking forward to less than visits to three separate theme parks: Tokyo Disney Sea, Tokyo Disney Land and Universal Studios Osaka.

I'm not a Disney guy, and the same thing that keeps me from enjoying horror games also stops me from enjoying thrill rides like rollercoasters, so I did not have a great time at either of the Disney parks (Star Tours notwithstanding). I am a Nintendo guy, at least, but had also heard so much about Super Nintendo World's overcrowding that I'd expected to turn up, see some hours-long lines, turn around and leave.

Lucky for me the day we picked to visit Universal Studios in Osaka turned out to be one of the least busy days of the entire year, and that despite being told we had to buy special, timed access tickets to get into Super Nintendo World), by the time we arrived at the park there were so few people there (I use that term relatively, there were still thousands of people there) that management quickly announced that fuck it, Super Nintendo World was open to everyone, all day, nobody needed a special ticket.

I know nobody needs a review of this place. It's been open for five years now (it was celebrating this on its signage while I was there), and there are countless YouTube guides to every corner of it that you can watch without reading a single word of what I thought. If there’s anything to take away from this experience, it is that I, a hollowed-out husk of a games media professional, a 46 year-old man who thought himself beyond things like childlike wonder, took one step into this place and felt the closest thing to a cartoon wave of sunshine washing over me as I've ever felt.

When I finally arrived at Super Nintendo World's custom entrance--being a new part of the park, it's built towards the back and you've got to climb a hill to get up there--nothing could have prepared me for the sight. I'd seen plenty of photos and videos of the park previously, but none of them had properly conveyed to me the fact that after emerging from a long warp pipe tunnel you are confronted with what look like life-size versions of Peach and Bowser's castles.

And trees, and Goombas, and question blocks, and...look, the thing is so big, and so fully-realised, that it really does feel, if only for fleeting moments (before you notice the restrooms and gift shops), that you have been transported into another world, one where the spiky grass and smooth stonework of the Mario universe have been made real. 

I honestly could have spent half a day just...being there, touching the walls and soaking up the sights, but the park was so empty that, despite not getting into Super Nintendo World until around 1pm, the normally hours-long line for the Mario Kart ride (Mario Kart: Koopa's Challenge) was only 45 minutes long, so we instantly jumped inside, and found that the immersion extended indoors as well.

The inside of Bowser's castle, which houses the ride, is clearly built to hold enough people for lines stretching for 4-5 hours, as its rooms and barricades appear to go on forever. To stop those people from despairing/rioting, the castle's interior is fully dressed in the way you would expect an actual Bowser's castle to be. There are provisions and working desks and trophy cabinets, all arranged in ways that no matter how long you're stuck there in a queue, you'll have something cool and interesting to look at. Again, even if I wasn't going on the ride, I would have been thrilled just to walk through this virtual world made real.

Our much shorter lines meant that instead of being stuck inside there for half a day we could instead just casually walk straight through, and near the end of the journey came to perhaps the coolest part of the whole experience, where the castle interior gives way to a Mario Kart TV broadcast experience, complete with replay screens, a locker room diorama and ride attendants who were dressed in Mario Kart-themed pit crew uniforms.

The ride itself is...fine. You and three other people sit in an over-sized kart, wear augmented reality goggles and spin around for a bit in a staged race, blasting your opponents with shells while also being whisked through themed race locations. 

The only minor disappointment was that The AR goggles actually detracted from the experience a little.  They weren't integrated seamlessly with their surroundings, so the dissonance between what was happening in your goggles vs what was happening around them detracted from the fantasy the rest of the ride (and Super Nintendo World itself!) works so hard to provide.

But whatever! Like I said, I'm not a rides guy, and like I've also said, I found the real joy in Super Nintendo World to be the world itself, not its specific attractions, so as disappointing as the few minutes of Mario Kart: Koopa's Challenge had been, I absolutely did not care. A stroll down to Donkey Kong's own separate space, which had banana shakes and an IRL version of GameCube classic Donkey Konga, seemed way more fun than its tiny little rollercoaster looked, and the experience of walking through a physical representation of Peach's castle, complete with shimmering paintings that look like you can jump right into them, was way more appealing than the crawling Yoshi ride that snakes around the area.

I didn't even really want to go to Universal! But I'm so glad I did, and that I picked a day with minimal crowds, because getting to wander around the space ended up being a highlight of the trip.

Now if they can just add a Hyrule Castle...