Universal Studios Japan

Fun but could use an app and had lots of break downs....

Universal Studios Japan is a well-known amusement park, similar in many ways to Disneyland and DisneySea with many striking differences. One of the things my family really enjoyed about Universal Studios Japan by comparison is option of a day and a half ticket, which meant we came one afternoon, enjoyed the afternoon and then spent the next whole day at the park. We really enjoyed this and found it was a great way to make sure that we made the most of our time there and got to enjoy all the rides we wanted to, even with a few long lines. The cost of drinks and food in the park is high, of course, which is to be expected with most amusement parks. Overall, we found that park very fun and engaging. Most of the rides were interesting enough. We do wish they had a more Disney-like app that would tell you the ride times and the restaurant times and give you restaurant menus, so that you can make choices about where to eat and where to go next on your phone while you're in line for one ride instead of having to run around afterward, which was challenging for us. We also wound up on two different rides that got canceled on our main park day, one of which was in the Mario World, which was hard to get into, and then we wasted an hour of the only two hours we had in that part of the park before the whole park closed in line for a ride that closed. They gave us a ticket for a free rapid pass to a one of a selection of rides that they said was good for one year, but that doesn't really matter to us as we live on the other side of Japan and can't afford to just come back sometime later this year to use it. So we were a little bit heartbroken, but it turned out okay because shortly after we got out of line, they finally fixed whatever the problem was and we got to actually go and do that one ride. The Mario Land was also kind of crap because In order to do most of the rides you had to pay extra for this wristband thing, which is also an amiibo. Apparently that's important, but we didn't have extra money to buy an extra thing. Especially for three different people, especially when I couldn't find any data online that verified the real price of it, which means the price has to be changing over time which means I don't want to bother with it. We only got to ride one ride in that part of the park but we did ride a lot of rides all over the park and overall we had a very enjoyable experience there. No big hassles. No, big negatives. Though, I do find it weird that in one day we had two different rights closed down on us. And we couldn't get a picture with any of the mascot folks as Puss in Boots ignored the crap out of my kid on our first day and we didn't have the heart to try again.