The Super Nintendo World section of Universal Studios Epic Universe in Orlando has been open for just about a year now, and for our big multi-family trip of the year we planned out one grueling day at Super Nintendo World followed by two comparatively chill days at LEGOLand. The kiddos aren’t really super interested in anything else offered at Universal, so we figured surely we’ll be able to squeeze all there is to squeeze out of the Nintendo Quadrant in a single day.

We were pretty much right. We were able to hit everything except the Mario Kart ride. If we asked the children to suffer through another two hour line we would have faced a serious mutiny.

The Rides#

There are presently only three rides in Nintendo World: Donkey Kong Mine-Cart Madness, Yoshi’s Adventure, and Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge. We dedicated the majority of our time to the DK ride because it is by far the highest-interest thing in the whole park, with lines hitting 2 hours right at park open. The gimmick with the ride is that it simulates a Donkey Kong Country mine-cart segment, with barrel launchers, simulated jumps over breaks in the track, simulated jumps between tracks, etc. It is amazingly executed, they pull it off by having the carts cantilevered over a fake railroad track while actually resting on a continuous metal track below. It’s a short but reasonably serious coaster, with good speed, design, corkscrews, and so on. I liked it, but it was a little much for kiddo. But even though I liked it, it’s very hard to recommend given the sheer length of the queue.

The other ride we did was Yoshi’s Adventure, which was wildly underwhelming. It’s a slow Yoshi-themed tour around the upper levels of the park, so you get some neat views, but it’s short, lacks meaningful interactivity, and is slow. At least the line wasn’t incredibly long, though.

The Experiences#

The park’s overarching gimmick is that it is full of interactive elements so long as you paid your $40 at the door for the wristband. These range from punchable blocks that make coin jingles, scannable symbols on walls that reveal hidden art, collectibles like K-O-N-G letters in the DKC area, and most substantially the Key Activities around the middle tier of the park.

So in addition to the rides and punchable cubes, the main other activity is to do 5 little minigames dotted around the mezzanine. None of them are super challenging, one’s just turning a crank to knock off a big animatronic goomba, one’s a timer challenge, one’s a bob-omb disarming game, etc. Complete 3 of these and you unlock a much more substantial shadow-game with Bowser Jr.

You can re-play any of these mini-games, but even these things had lines, and some of them were non-trivial 15-20m lines waiting to watch a kid turn a crank, and all but the crank one appeared to have failure states! You could have your small child sit there in line for 20 minutes and then lose and have to go to the back of the line to try to time-hit a koopa shell again. Worse, it isn’t super well communicated that not everyone in your party has to get all the keys, it turns out just one person in your party has to have gotten sufficient keys. We nearly experienced An Incident if that wasn’t the case, but got through it.

All these interactive bits also feed back into the Universal App, which tracks everything you scan or complete as little collectible stamps (like in Super Mario 3D Land!), stacks up coins for everything you interact with (with an hourly leaderboard!), gives you little trophies for completing each major attraction, and honestly it all worked shockingly well. The only thing that sucked was that it costs $40 to get a band and that the app itself was like a little web-app thingie buried multiple clicks deep into the Universal Studios app.

The Food#

Oof. $40 koopa shell-themed Hot Pockets. $20 Yoshi-themed Slurpees. Who knows what kind of ludicrous experience inside the Toadstool Cafe, which we skipped because we knew it would be absurd to try to get three adults and three children in there without An Incident. The ice cream stuff back in the DK zone looked good, but again, getting a bunch of children that full of sugar when they’re already getting squirrelly seemed wildly ill-advised.

The Merch#

Two stands, two shops. Good selection of exclusive merch and generic stuff you could find anywhere. Kiddo got a Reversible Yoshi Pillow, I got a Red Pikmin.

The Set & Overall Design#

They absolutely killed it. It looks amazing, and since it’s sorta situated in a pit, there is nothing to break the immersion apart from all the tourists milling about. The park is packed densely with little art touches, little hidden secrets, references, Pikmin, etc. The big stuff looks amazing too, the castle looks amazing, the warp pipe entrance is stunning, and there’s just nothing bad to say about it.

The Price#

This is where it goes off the rails. While generally wonderful, it’s INCREDIBLY hard to justify this park. For the day we went, Adult Florida Resident one-day admission cost $189, with children at the amazing discounted price of $187, with tax it was effectively $200 each. (Just checking now, it looks like ticket prices range from ~$160-$220, so we got it for about average after taxes.) POWERUP Wristband? That’s another $40 each. Parking? $60 if you want to be in the shade. “Lunch”? That’s another $60 for two humans.

But none of that is the ludicrous part, the truly insane part is their Express Pass pricing: $200 per person, straight up DOUBLING the cost of entry if you want to skip effectively to the front of the lines. And there’s no “unlimited” version of the pass, for Universal Studios Classic you can skip every ride’s line once for $120/day, and can skip the line however many times you want for the same ride for $160/day. The one for Epic Universe straight up has no unlimited version, and if it did they’d probably be charging upwards of $250 for it.

I know it’s the New Park and it’s only in its first year but this is absurd to me. I can get a LEGOland annual pass with parking included for $220, without any specials running! And that gets me discounts on LEGO sets bought on-site too!

Recommendation#

If you are remotely interested, and can suffer through 2 hour long lines, I can recommend the park once if you just want to knock out the Nintendo area. But absolutely avoid it during peak season. And during Summer. Basically all times. Find a tiny sliver of False Winter in Feb/March or November/December when it’s 60 and breezy and go nuts.