Making The Most Of Universal Studios & Super Nintendo World In Japan

One of the absolute highlights of our trip to Japan was, believe it or not, a day at a theme park! Japan has some brilliant theme parks, from DisneySea to Fuji-Q, and it goes without saying that Universal Studios Japan is one of the best they have to offer.

We had always been planning to go to Universal in Osaka, but what really sealed the deal was Super Nintendo World opening up. It’s now one of two in the world, but this is the original – and where better to visit than the country Nintendo was created?!

That said, Super Nintendo World is so popular that it can be really hard to get in. Your options are:

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a) spend a lot of money on an express pass that will guarantee you access on a timed entry ticket.
b) get there before 6am, queue for up to 2 hours, RUN VERY FAST and hope for the best.
c) try booking a timeslot on the app, which is free, but you can only do it once you’re in the park and therefore they will most likely all be sold out.

A once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan that we weren’t doing on a tight budget? Guess what we did.

In this post I’ll not only talk about how FRICKING FANTASTIC the park is, but also delve into whether the expensive fast passes are worth buying.

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Eventually, Super Nintendo World will become less popular; the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter area originally required timed entry tickets to enter as well, but these are no longer necessary. But for now, and with the Donkey Kong expansion opening soon, they will be needed for Super Nintendo World for a while.

We bought the Express Pass 4 – Fun Variety, which included:

• timed entry to Super Nintendo World
• timed ride slot for Mario Kart
• timed entry to the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter
• timed ride slot for The Forbidden Journey
• fast pass for Jaws
• fast pass for Minion Mayhem

In hindsight, I would have maybe gone for the Thrills Variety instead, which has the same timed entry/rides, but instead of Jaws and Minion Mayhem, it includes The Flying Dinosaur and Hollywood Dream (I have a feeling it was more expensive though, which might be why I didn’t choose it!). Our biggest queue of the day was The Flying Dinosaur, so it could have been worth skipping the line for that as it’s one of the most popular rides.

Express passes go on sale about a month in advance but it’s worth keeping an eye on it so you can book as soon as they go up. I recommend buying them on Klook – this was my go-to for a few things in Japan, and we also bought the entrance tickets to Universal through them.

(The express pass link isn’t actually an affiliate link unfortunately – they don’t offer any commission on those!!)

Once you choose the pass, you also have to choose the time slot, which can be a bit confusing. Almost everything available to me offered Super Nintendo World in the late afternoon or even at night (e.g. 8.15pm when the park closes at 9pm!). The few morning slots available then had the Wizarding World times in the evening instead, e.g. 9am for Nintendo World, 8pm for the Forbidden Journey ride. I’m not gonna lie, I was a little stressed looking through the list trying to figure out the optimal times!

The only slot left which had reasonable times gave us Super Nintendo World at 11am, and the Forbidden Journey ride at 1.30pm. I had no idea how long we’d want in SNW, but I had a plan – get to Universal relatively early and go STRAIGHT to the Wizarding World to get on the Forbidden Journey; then we wouldn’t need to worry about using the fast pass.

As it happens, we got in to the Wizarding World just after 9am and the queue for the Forbidden Journey was already at two hours. Meaning by my calculation that we wouldn’t even have enough time to go on it before Super Nintendo World – and this was relatively early in the day! Do not underestimate the queues here.

Instead, we explored Hogsmeade at our leisure, got some Butterbeer and some breakfast, watched a ridiculous Hippogriff costume walk past like a frigging pantomime horse, and went into all the shops. So our time definitely wasn’t wasted – we had a great time!

The Wizarding World in Japan is much smaller than the Florida park – for one thing, there’s only the Hogsmeade section. There’s the Hogwarts Express train by the entrance, as well as the Three Broomsticks which offers sit-down meals, a cart serving butterbeer, a stall serving little pie things, and of course some very well themed gift shops.

There’s also a pretty “lake” with reflections of Hogwarts castle!

But the best was yet to come – I cannot even begin to tell you how AMAZING Super Nintendo World is! It literally feels like you’ve walked into a video game. I loved everything about it!

We all got wristbands before we went in so we could use them for games, blocks etc. You can use these all over the Nintendo World area, hitting blocks to collect coins and keeping your scores in the games. It really is like you’re in the game! They’re quite pricey – about £25, but they were a must for us.

Of course, the first thing we did was head straight to Bowser’s Castle for the Mario Kart ride. This was SO MUCH fun, and about as close as you’ll ever come to being in the game.

There’s a lot before the ride itself too – not only is the castle full of things to look at in the queue, but they spend a while explaining all the controls too. You have to wear a visor that clips in to a helmet (it took me an embarrassing minute to figure this out) and there’s a lot to take in. It makes the anticipation exciting, though!

This is truly the coolest, most immersive ride I’ve ever been on! Which is probably because it’s got to be the coolest, most immersive ride in the world, surely. There is a LOT going on and it’s chaotic. We would have gone on it again if the queues weren’t so huge.

The gift shop is great too, and Ash & I picked up our headbands there! I got a mushroom one and Ash got a Yoshi one, which matched our wristbands. We also got a couple of little things like keyrings. Most of our Nintendo purchases had been at Nintendo stores elsewhere in Japan, so we were only after a couple of things exclusive to the park.

There’s also Yoshi’s Adventure, a whimsical ride with great views of Nintendo World as you ride around in your own Yoshi. Even though it’s very much a kiddy ride, we loved this! Although again, the queue was pretty long (about an hour, I think).

After exploring the rest of Super Nintendo World, the others all did the mini games where you collect keys, and once you’ve collected three keys, you’re able to enter the boss mini game: Bowser Jr!

The queues for each mini game were quite long, so we chose the shortest ones – but it still took a while to get through them. One was turning a crank to stop a Goomba wreaking havoc, another is a puzzle putting a coin together to defeat a Bob-omb, and there’s another where you have to change the colours of all the blocks on the screen (this was the easiest one apparently!). There are a couple of others too, so you really could spend hours on these.

Meanwhile I was quite happy exploring and taking photos. What a cool place!

There are also massive queues for all the food places. We decided to forgo the main restaurant, Kinopio’s Café, purely because the food is meant to be distinctly average. You have to get a time slot, and there was nothing available for about five hours – I know we were planning to spend a chunk of the day in Nintendo World, but maybe not that long!

I did start queuing at the popcorn stand on behalf of Bobbie, who really wanted one of the popcorn buckets that doubles as a star lamp. This was pretty cool, I have to admit – worth the $25? She would say so, as it’s now proudly displayed in their house!

Kinopio’s does have some pretty aesthetically pleasing dishes if that’s your thing, though – rice shaped like a star, a burger with a lil Mario hat, Tiramisu in a question mark block… and even Princess Peach’s cake! If it was easier to get into, we might have done it, but we weren’t bothered enough. There are better themed restaurants in Japan!

We did also go to the Yoshi stand, which has shell bao bun type things. These were pretty good, and reasonably priced – AND we didn’t have to queue very long at all! Great for a snack. You can also get drinks in various shaped containers for a lot of money, too!

Of course, we had to get some photos with the game blocks, even if we didn’t quite get the jumping one right!

To be honest, even if you get there early and manage to get a timed entry on the app, the queues for the Mario Kart ride can be astronomical. I’ve heard of up to 3 hours, although it was just over 1.5 hours when we were there (I think it was 100 minutes most of the times we went past). With the fast pass, we were on the ride within 20 minutes.

The good thing about having to queue at all though, is that there’s loads to look at in Bowser’s Castle in the queue! If a fast pass meant missing all of that, it would actually be worth slowing down to see it.

By the time we got out of Super Nintendo World, we’d been in there for almost four hours, and we’d completely missed our slot for the Forbidden Journey. Maybe I should have just booked the one with the evening Forbidden Journey slot, I thought.

However, we joined the queue, which was a whopping 2 hours 20 minutes. 20 minutes in, Bobbie decided to go and ask if we could still use our fast pass. To our absolute amazement, they said yes, and let us in!

We strolled excitedly through Hogwarts, stopping to marvel at Dumbledore’s office and to see a weird video of Harry, Ron & Hermione speaking in Japanese, and finally arrived at the lockers, where someone was scanning fast passes. As she scanned ours, it came up red on the screen with an error. We held our breath, dreading being sent to the back of the queue… and she ignored it and let us through! Phew!

We’ve been on the Forbidden Journey in Florida before, and the Japan one is exactly the same except it’s in Japanese (surprise!). Therefore I can confidently say it’s one of my favourite rides ever! The mix of screen simulation and physical animatronics melds perfectly into this immersive experience of flying through the sky, avoiding dragons and coming face-to-face with giant spiders. Apart from the spiders, it’s soooooo good!

And we had just skipped two hours of queues, thank goodness.

We still had two fast passes to use from our express pass – firstly, Jaws. I was very surprised by just how long the queue was for Jaws; almost two hours again! We skipped the entire line and waited for about ten minutes for a boat to take us to our doom.

The Jaws ride was retired many years ago in Florida, so we never got to go on it – therefore I was excited to finally experience this legendary ride! Let’s face it: it’s very dated. But that doesn’t make it any less fun! The “tour guides” on each boat are brilliant too; just unbridled over-the-top Japanese comedy horror.

We then headed over to New York, which is a fantastic area to just walk around as the sets and theming are awesome. We were going on Minion Mayhem, which we had to convince our friends is actually a really fun ride. We all hate Minions, because who doesn’t? And yet… this simulation ride is a lot of fun!

It’s slightly different to the one in Florida. To be honest, the set-up takes a little too long, so we were losing anticipation about half way through the pre-ride video. But it IS a good ride, nonetheless.

Our final ride would be the Flying Dinosaur, which looked absolutely epic. We had no idea what was about to hit us.

It had completely passed me by as one of the big rides, as we were so focused on Super Nintendo World and Harry Potter. Therefore, I did NOT expect it to be the most intense ride I have ever been on! Pretty sure we got some actual G-force.

So, the big question – is the express pass for Super Nintendo World worth it?

Honestly, it was something we were quibbling over because it IS expensive. The price varies by day – for us it was just over £110 each, and that’s on top of the park entry which is around £50. Ultimately, we decided it was worth it for a one-off experience.

In the end, we not only got guaranteed entry to Super Nintendo World, skipped the queue for Mario Kart, and even managed to skip the queue for the Forbidden Journey despite missing our time slot, but altogether it meant we skipped SIX HOURS of queuing. Even the Jaws ride had a queue of almost two hours!

When you only have one day in a theme park, that really is a massive amount of time, and we probably wouldn’t have got on half the rides if it meant winging it without the pass, and would have spent most of the day in a queue.

It is what it is, but we had our hearts set on going to Super Nintendo World and didn’t want to be disappointed if we turned up and missed out. Instead, we could go knowing that we’d definitely be getting in, and that we could rock up a few minutes before our slot to get wristbands without having to worry about hordes of people running ahead of us to get in.

Buy USJ express passes through Klook – and you can also buy your Universal Studios tickets on there too!

So as a one-off special purchase, I’d say it was 100% worth saving all the stress!

Like I said, I wish I’d known more about The Flying Dinosaur (it wasn’t even really on my radar as a must-do!) as we would probably have gone for the Thrills pass rather than the Fun variety. Though I was glad we got to do the Jaws ride, which is no longer in other Universal parks!

This was truly a day of unbridled fun for us. In fact, if you’re planning a lot of time in Super Nintendo World but also want to experience the rest of the park, a 1.5 day ticket might be worth it too! We had to miss a couple of the big rides (Hollywood Dream being the main one) because we simply ran out of time, though that’s down to doing all those mini-games in Super Nintendo World.

Overall, Universal is consistently one of our favourite theme parks – this is the third one we’ve been to! You couldn’t wipe the smiles off our faces, especially in Super Nintendo World. It might even be the best theme park we’ve ever been to, for the fact it really feels like you’re in a game! Like no matter how good the theming is, you still know you’re in a theme park. In SNW, that separation was much less clear. Which sounds mad, but it really is that good!

While I would have liked to have had a day at the Disney parks, I’m very glad we prioritised Universal. This was one of the most fun days of our whole Japan trip!

Have you been to any Japanese theme parks?

Want to read all about our other Japan adventures? Check out these posts!
⭐ A Love Letter To Osaka, Japan: Why It’s Worth More Than A Day Trip
⭐ Shrines, Temples & Geisha: How To Spend Two Days In Magical Kyoto, Japan
⭐ Five Days In The Bright Lights Of Tokyo
⭐ Visiting the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo + Tips For Buying Tickets
⭐ An Overnight Trip To Hiroshima, Miyajima & Himeji From Osaka
⭐ Our Perfect Two Week Itinerary For A First Time Visit To Japan
⭐ My Top 10 Highlights Of Our Trip To Japan