hey hey come on over and have some fun with spicy taxi
I was looking for something to do today with some free time, and as sometimes happens, my mind wandered towards Daiba. the Miraikan science museum there is pretty nice, there's some good sights, a small retro Showa-esque arcade, a ton of shopping malls if you feel like browsing stores, and ... well, there's not Toyota Megaweb or the cool ferris wheel or TeamLab anymore due to redevelopment. but maybe there will be something cool in a few years!
daiba is the kind of place that feels like you can stack together a bunch of smallish activities and make a good half-to-full day of it, so I said "why the heck not", hopped on the train, and immediately filled all of my plans by committing to Joypolis
who wants to see me write 4500 words about going on some rides
Joypolis is a SEGA-affiliated indoor theme park located in one of the zillion malls in Daiba, right next to the Legoland and the Madame Tussauds, and it's been kind of one those things on the corner of my mind for a while, maybe due to the time a bunch of BGM from it ended up in maimai.
I had secret hopes that it would be a nice B-Tier Theme Park experience, a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the lines (which I can not really stand to bear on a free weekend day) of the big players in the theme park market, with Branding Identity that is more in line with my personal tastes. and it turned out pretty good!
the secret in tipping my hand, as always, is Convenience
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the tickets were heavily discounted - 20% off for buying through a discount site, then another 20% off for showing my vaccine passport. my brain is very dumb and stops working when I see discounts that I can achieve just by trying a little. if this is what they wanted the "true" price to be, it's a modest enough price for me to pay
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joypolis offers no-friction re-entry; just scan your pass to get in and out. combined with its location in the middle of a bunch of Daiba Stuff, this meant that even if the lines kind of sucked early or midday, I could go hop out to play some Gunbullet (Point Blank) at the Showa arcade, or go check out the funky looking Fuji TV building, and come back later in the day no sweat
so there I was, standing in a closed shopping mall 5 minutes before opening, in a quite modest line of maybe only 100 people or so, holding my vaccine proof and my e-ticket, ready to accomplish Maximum Optimization by hammering out as much fun as possible before my patience or my body gave out
the welcome experiernce
the first thing that stands out to me is that joypolis somehow feels just really Small at the entrance compared to outdoor theme parks or even namco's namjatown in ikebukuro. I was surprised to find out that it's still about 75% the size of namjatown and 33% the size of universal studios japan, but I think what contributes to joypolis's cramped feeling is its verticality - it's a 3 story building where you walk around the center of it, with rides occupying most of the space and making the walkways sorta cramped
like, if outdoor theme parks try to separate you from the real world with grand entrances that make you feel like you've walked into a weird idealized version of 1900s america, joypolis is just a mall (located within a mall) where all the hot topics sell sonic goods and the burlington coat factory is a roller coaster.
this isn't bad per se, just different! joypolis's re-entry policy means you can kind of just hop outside quickly to go snap some pictures of rainbow bridge or the statue of liberty, or go to a bunch of different, non-Sega-sponsored novelty food courts (like the takoyaki one on the showa-themed floor of the same mall)
anyway, I'm now out 2800 yen and determined to make equivalent value to buying rides a la carte (800 yen admission + 600 yen per ride), so let's get to an annotated ridethrough of as much of the park as possible before my back gives out or I start having a craving for mozzerella sticks from TGI Friday's (one of the few places in Japan to sell legit ones)
halfpipe tokyo
while researching joypolis, I discovered that there was a collab running with Hololive 3rd gen, with a bunch of money sinks for collab goods and foods, as well as a few themed touches for some of the rides. halfpipe tokyo seemed like the major one, with riders being treated to a random selection from five 3rd gen songs as they halve the pipes or whatnot
figuring this would make the attraction a big draw (in addition to its premium 900 yen price tag, which only two rides in the park shared), I elected to swing my weight as Chief "I'm Your Treasure Box" Officer and went straight for it at opening (a much shorter walk than going for any premium ride at an outdoors theme park), and discovered joypolis's secret weapon for millenials: Gamification
halfpipe tokyo, like many rides that day, was happy to award me a score for interacting with Marine's flirtacious laughter, and moreover, offered something more (no, it's not Marine) - the better my score, the more the ride would attempt to forcibly hurl me out of it
halfpipe tokyo turns out to be a rhythm game of sorts, where you are strapped into a standing contraption where you swing back and forth in a halfpipe (again, while Marine cackles and gyrates. no, they did not censor the movie at all), with the goal being to throw your weight on a foot pedal right as your "skateboard" passes a white line at the center of the board. the better your timing, the more the ride spins when you crest the halfpipe, from a gentle 180 to a backbreaking 1080 (as the whole Holocrew shouts LIMIT BREAK in your ear) - and yes, high scores are displayed and saved.
I had the fortune to indeed be blessed with the funniest answer to "what is your favorite Toby Fox song" as I boarded the ride, but knowing that the ride was scored put me in Super Gaming mode, tapping my safety harness to the beat and putting on a focused stare as I landed off-beat early after early, earning me twice the amount of disdainful Marine laughter (one layer from the song, one from her MCing my extremely mediocre score).
anyway what I'm saying is that my music game timing never changes, and I scored a 4140, third out of fourth place and not even on the extremely generic "WHAT RANK ARE YOU" board shown by the ride exit. so you know, there was only one thing to do
halfpipe tokyo (round 2)
looping around the line, I noticed that the park hadn't heated up too much for being 20 minutes into opening. the line for halfpipe was still very modest, though the wait time had increased quite a fair bit.
compared to Big Theme Parks, joypolis is a bit more relaxed in terms of guest pacing - there's few people running each ride, and there's a lot more downtime when it comes to explanation and getting people on and off the ride, so even a short line can run up a fair wait time (though net searching says it never really gets worse than an hour)
as I watched the other Gen 3 MVs, I mused about how the animation quality for these really varied (from full MVs to mobage song style "here is our one art we commissioned"), and internally fistpumped when I realized that I managed to cycle around in exactly the right number of rides to land I'm Your Treasure Box again. I must have Dangerous Marine Smell all over me
(you ever stop and wonder what Camellia, Toby Fox, or Marine meant by "Dangerous Marine Smell"?)
this time I doubled my amount of All Business and earned my pride back, scoring a resounding victory with 7020 points (though someone already posted 10080 points to Noel's Lyrical Monster) and also an impressively queasy stomach. twice the spins is no joke
geki-on live coaster
I made my way across the first floor to the other big-ticket attraction, the self-described first fusion of music game and roller coaster (or, as the English puts it cheerfully, "This is the first coaster attraction in the world!". I'm not so sure about that one).
as a self-described first fusion of music gamer and loaf of french bread from Safeway (at least at one point in my life), I once again felt my pride roaring as I strapped myself in and sounded out the three-button controller within hand's reach. This is a four-player competitive coaster, where each player's score is visible and also (record scratch) the notes are stuck at 1.0x speed?!
yes, the greatest curse for anyone going backwards from newer beatmanias to really old versions, the inability to deal with slow notes, was out in full force, as the roller coaster slowly shifted us through a mix of original songs with Joypolis's mascot, and Sonic classics like Live & Learn and Escape from the City (which I greatly appreciated).
to be honest, the whole thing felt a bit "oil and water" to me, as the experience was largely stop-and-go - you play a small snippet of a song shown on a projector, roll forward at slow speed in the dark, stop, play another song snippet, go up an ominous hill with flashing lights, think "alright this is going to be it", then stop, play another song, before dumping you into a rollercoaster that was much more aggressive than I expected, including a hold-on-to-your-glasses corkscrew, before kind of letting you rotate in place at the coaster's end like a spinning tea cup.
if I had to make this coaster, I would make the rhythm game sections something to do during thrill-downtime (such as slow sections or going up hill), rather than a stopped segment that breaks up the flow of everything. I scored a 72% and didn't bother coming back to salvage my pride - if I had to describe the charts' difficulty, I'd say "mostly quarter notes with some jumps, but also some things seemed like eighth notes but were not really clear given the lack of differentiation"
house of the dead - scarlet dawn
stomach reeling at this point, I made my way to the second floor to explore, leaving a few less-big-ticket rides (hidden behind the obligatory arcade full of taiko and sega music games and also a beat saber cab that I forgot to come back for) behind.
the second floor feels like the Brand Zone, with Sonic carnival games (that I've read way too many Reddit articles on throw-the-ball-in-the-bucket rigged games to burn money on), a Transformers ride, and this House of the Dead attraction.
it claims a 30 minute wait time despite having 10 people in line, so I call doubt and queue up, whereupon I notice that the ride is basically a fancy 4D chair with a full-auto lightgun strapped to it. one thing that's kind of natural given joypolis's small size is that you can't "hide" the rides from customers in the same way as big theme parks, so I can easily see that this ride is going to be a questionable amount of waiting for "point a cursor at some zombies and wait for them to explode".
personally, this doesn't sound like my thing at the moment, so I decide to duck out of line and head to
transformers human alliance special
the other presumably-a-lightgun-game branded attraction next door, with an equally long line but a 10 minute wait time for these fully enclosed circular pods that remind me of the ol' senjo no kizuna.
this feels like just the right amount of time to wait for a lightgu- (watches one of the pods rotate fully upside down like it is a trackball being rolled by an invisible hand) oh god no, no more thrill, please, I'm old and boring
storm g
immediately abandoning ship, I head to storm g, which has all the looks of a nice little futuristic pod racing sort of thing. i'm always up for a good race game, and from all the footage I'm watching of the people in front of me, the game has some serious "AM2 racing game" vibes to its menus and energy. I'm daydreaming a little bit of this having at least a little f-zero or wipeout energy, all the while wishing I had come to joypolis when they had the full-size Initial D v3 cabs.
the group in front of me begins loading their stage, and at the top of the course map I notice: "Roll Difficulty: *****"
me: joypolis give me a ride that does not go upside down
joypolis: ǝǝǝǝǝɥʍ ɐɥɐɥɐɥ
I tough it out, blasting Magical Sound Shower louder and louder inside my head as I watch players hit Spin Zones where a quick button press rewards them with a triple barrel roll as their ship zooms through a corkscrew like sonic the hedgehog. I resolve to take my glasses off for real this time.
when I board, I fortunately find that the pod is split front/back rather than left/right, meaning my front row seat is crammed close enough to the screen that my terribly nearsighted eyes can make out some semblance of the blobs on the screen. by the mercy of the gods and the other players, the majority of players vote for the baby course for small children (for people who only want 3 star roll difficulty), and we're off to the races.
the ship is controlled twin thruster style - both joysticks ahead to go, and one up / one down to turn. buttons on the top activates Spin Mode when appropriate, though as I get queasier and queasier (going from eyes open -> eyes closed -> ok let's just not spin at all), I find that spinning does not actually offer any positional advantage over other players, despite shooting your speed up to 400 km/h. by that I mean I won without spinning for half the race and taking the shortest, most boring path through the track rather than swerving around for boost panels
overall, I had a pretty harsh evaluation for this one, perhaps due to my high expectations borne entirely of nice menus and a cool course map. the whole experience felt very Raw Thrills racing, where what you do doesn't actually matter so much, the "tech" is mostly press the button where you tell you, and the handling feels sort of disconnected and unresponsive
wild jungle brothers
skipping Tower-Tag VR Esports (which seems to be a 2v2 VR shooter) both out of respect for my stomach which WILL fight me if I try VR again, and out of avoidance for the long line which I presume the word "Esports" gave birth to, I head to the third floor, which appears to be the "everything else" zone.
here I am hoping for more experience-based rides rather than thrill ones, which is why I, like a genius, go straight for the three rides with Wild in the name
"Wild Jungle Brothers", "Wild River: Treasure Hunt", and "Wild Wing" are presumably all related, either as part of some Star Wars trilogy or Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow pick your favorite version deal, and I arbitrarily picked the one with a prop of Sonic and Tails in a crashed jeep embedded into it
in Wild Jungle Brothers, you and up to 11 other screaming kids here on a group excursion board a jeep, which then gets jostled around as a screen shows you performing typical indiana jones ruin exploration, including hustling through the jungle, going over a rickety bridge, and escaping from not one, not two, but three boulders rolling ominously towards you at the same time.
I would offer more details but I went through half this ride with my eyes closed, because, in my foolishness, I forgot a near-identical ride setup at USJ (for a honey-I-shrunk-the-kids Minions ride, amusingly) got me incredibly carsick as the vehicle's shaking completely failed to line up with the video I was watching on a static screen, and the adventures of Ash, Gary, and Pikachu (actual names forgotten) did the same number to me.
I would like to note at this point that this is the first ride where I notice a big part of joypolis's shtick is having cast members who really love to put their whole heart into the pre-ride exposition - if I had to compare, whereas I'm used to very clinical staff members who leave all the flavor to pre-recorded audio and visual clips, joypolis feels full of Theater Kids who are ready to dramatically grunt as they pull on your safety bar and crack jokes as they see you off. it's actually quite fun (though I imagine tiring if you did not sign up for this)
anyway am I doing the rest of the wild three? no, please give me the most boring ride possible
fortune forest
scanning the map, I identify this attraction as something that is guaranteed to have no thrill moments, with its "are you safe to ride this?" warning listing only "can you follow directions". I'm not really confident tbh, my japanese is not that good...
fortune forest seems to be an elaborate fortuneteller, which is probably a chill date attraction or something but I'm here in line with a bunch of other holoheads trying to figure out what the hololive-specific theming is on this.
as the clerk sends me off into the dark room with a ding of his bell, I discover that the forest is basically an unguided series of tablets where you plug your novelty-size memory card (a clear crystal) and answer - in extremely sloppy english, if you choose - all your favorite yes/no personality quiz questions. do you like going on walks alone? can you wait when someone is late? are you honest when a friend troubles you?
you collect a series of three scandinavian runes as you go (mine made a pretty good imitation of nonowa), and at the end, you deposit your tablet into a hole and are unceremoniously gifted a sheet of paper with a picture of hololive girls on the front (buy goods at the cafe today!) and a quite detailed personality readout on the back. here's an excerpt:
"Your Current Situation: You seem to have unreasoning feelings. You originally have a very exact belief, but this advantage seems not to be sufficiently utilized at present. You had better determin your mind protecting yourself. Your lucky color is deep dark gre(line break)en that will raise your luck. Same Type of the Famous: Yamashita Kiyoshi"
there are five personality assessments you can take ("yourself", romance, career, and two others I forget), and I thought about looping it again to take one in Japanese, but honestly, it was just a little bit too slow paced. would love to mash through this faster and grind out my fortunes
I found out just now that the webpage for this ride says "this attraction can calm your mood after enjoying hard rides". thanks! you were right
attack on titan: decision
I have exactly zero knowledge nor interest in attack on titan. it's simply something I've never considered outside of the brief period in granblue fantasy where the titan collab granted characters with 100% triple attack (useful for grinding in some scenarios), but like, sure what the heck it's like right next to fortune forest, let's go for it
this ride appears to be advertising the fact that you get to make a choice! it's in the name and everything!
it turns out to be a lightly immersive walk-through experience. the staff member welcoming you at the entrance goes through the safety rules, then says "I'm going to go roleplay mode" and stands on a box and immediately bursts out in a booming rendition of Mr. Titan or whoever he is supposed to be playing
you follow him through the crowded corridors of Titan Town, meeting another cast member who is a bit more of a bumbling but well-meaning fool. the "decision" turns out to be a branching path where you choose (as a group) which of the two to follow when the titans attack, moving through a few shaky and dramatic rooms with fog, loud noises, a third cast member who exists solely to stand in the prop of a giant titan and get eaten. there are some composites of static anime sprites with talking heads that kind of animate in and out of screens with all the aplomb of a mobile game from a few years ago.
for me, it's an experience that's perfectly Fine, no notes. fans of the series will probably get pumped up more, but the real winner here are the cast members, who really have a grand time acting. or so i hope.
I receive a random sticker of some character with glasses at the exit to the attraction. my sense has won out yet again
sadako: she's on her way
arbitrarily walking past MURDER LODGE because that sounds just a little bit too spooky, I note that the other hololive attraction, Bijomen, doesn't open until 12:30, a handful of minutes away, so I stop by sadako next door.
a sign outside sadako says "you will be confined in a cramped locker during this attraction; please refrain from riding if you are uncomfortable with this". cramped locker? my room is already 4 tatami mats! (laughtrack)
honestly I'm not actually sure whether this or MURDER LODGE seems more scary to me on paper. in general horror is a mixed bag for me - I'm really bad with jumpscares, and horror where I have to use my imagination wrecks me very hard. I think I'm pretty strong against horror in a attraction-like environment because it feels a bit too "fake", but maybe with the right buy-in I'd be jumping out of my sneakers.
in any case, my opinion of Sadako, upon looking at the cursed tape that they show you at the beginning of the attraction (after being hustled next to the "you must be less than 185cm to ride" sign by the entrance, whereupon my 184cm self offers a sheepish "I can squat a bit if that helps"), is that I look at the haunted girl crawling out of the well or whatever and think "yeah that's me getting up in the morning"
this attraction is walk-through in the same way as attack on titan, where an extremely animated cast member (this time acting as a curse-expelling psychic or whatever) gives the group a free spirit reading, where you get to see a few innocuous blobby boys bounce around the room before sadako jump scares everyone and the psychic hurriedly ushers you into the Exorcism Chamber (a locker with about 1000 seals pasted on it).
you watch through the slats of the locker (which cleverly fog up to allow for some surprise moments) as sadako (presumably played by another staff) comes and bangs on every single locker, rattling the door as heavy breathing emanates through some speakers. a movie plays that is presumably creepy but is mostly very difficult to see from my specific locker at the end. the locker suddenly dips you back 45 degrees, a move that caught me totally off guard. then you're back and out of the locker, the psychic dripping with sweat and asking you if you're okay.
it turns out you're not okay, as sadako gets one last jump scare in on you as you leave
bijomen (lola and carla's beauty contest)
but enough of that, let's go be stars!
I had though the attractions that open at 12:30 (notably this one, the phoenix wright attraction, and something that appears to be joypolis-branded version of Sonic But Not Mario At The Olympic Games) opened at 12:30 because they were live shows or something operating at specific times, but I think this might actually just be a tactic to keep you here until 12:30. phoenix wright in particular is highly automatic
anyway last on the hololive list is the real Yakuza Major Minigame Simulator cum Purikura Machine, where you have your chance to interview to become a host or a cabaret girl. and by the grace of god, no talking to actual humans is required!
bijomen is another, more gamified personality test (plus purikura machine, natch), where you are interviewed by two stereotypically "mama"-looking (in the club mother sense, not in the... does she have two hit multi target attacks sense) chibis and asked to express your personality and ability to handle customers by answering questions on a giant touchscreen table (microsoft surface the og, is that you). stuff like "are you a cat or dog person (you can also pick rabbit)", "which date do you begin to hold hands on?", "if you had to read one of these (exaggerated title) books, which would you choose".
it's actually quite engaging because you are handed a card with your government-assigned cabaret girl / host name, and answer by sliding it around on the touchscreen, allowing for sliding-scale answers in not just one but two dimensions. lola and carla react to your answers and call you by name, providing animated (if not stereotypical in that very specific overexaggerated way) commentary and calling you boring when you answer "if I got a ton of money, I'd save it".
all the while, generic Sexy Club BGM blasts in the background, interrupted occasionally by Pekora laughing or Marine telling you to be more decisive, in the same way that a supermarket clerk would call for a cleanup on aisle 6.
eventually, you're shuffled off to stage two of the interview, a photo booth where you take five poses that vaguely reflect the job you're going for. I apparently attempted to treat it as a competition to see how many photos I can blink for in a row. you get to pick one to print, you're told you got the job (or maybe sometimes you're not? a failure state is visible though I am uncertain if you can "achieve" it), and you go out to the front desk, where you're handed the full-size 3x5" photo of your choice, along the your host fee (effectively your score), ratings on various stats (adultness, wickedness, sexiness, etc) and a little readout of your personality and ideal type.
to me, this is basically The Cooler Fortune Forest, and my sleeper hit of the day. the attraction being Japanese only, but barely within my comprehension levels gave me a nice ego boost, and the 8-second time limit on questions actually made the control scheme funnier, as I would wildly be swinging around my card as I read answers. "what kind of food would you make for your lover" hmmm... chicken? no, pasta, no, WAIT, myself hahaha that's the one
bijomen gets extra bonus points because you can freely choose whether to be a host or a cabaret girl regardless of your IRL appearance, which gives the attraction bonus replayability (as the question sets do diverge) as well as putting to rest the often-never-asked question: would I make more money as a cabaret girl or a host guy?
I looped the attraction repeatedly in the hunt of the Hololive Special Picture Border only granted to those who earn the glory and profit of being hired for the Ginza Club (as opposed to Shinjuku), seeing the same woman in line in front of me grind out the host life three times, and I have the answer for you:
the best path... is to make everything up
as a cabaret girl and as a host, answering the questions to the best of my ability (which is to say, honestly, but understanding when to embellish as part of a job interview), I scored just shy of a 15,000y rate. but on my third try, I abandoned all pretenses of self, answering only with what I thought would earn me the most brownie points.
and let me tell you: lola and carla fucking saw through me! they told me my answers were shit, and where I had previously heard "congrats!" at the end of the q&a, I got "well, you made it". but my photos must have been gold or something, because I scored a staggering 30,300y rake at Club Pekora. that's like two whole genders put together!
so you heard it from bijomen. people hate being fake, but being fake sells. all of life is kayfabe. live it up
ok I have two more attractions to go but I'm at 4,500 words and that's a fun place to stop so let's call it for now