My Ranking Of All The Rides (I went on) At Epic Universe

and also ranking other stuff

One week ago Som-Mai and I got to spend a day at a preview for the opening-at-the-end-of-the-month newest Universal theme park in Orlando: Epic Universe! And it was very fun, and not just because I got to feel like I was taking my theme park snobbery to previously unseen heights¹.

Meta takeaway, I think it’s a really great park! It’s quality over quantity (being notably smaller than say Island of Adventure, but I think I higher average hit rate²) and I assume the crowds will be ludicrous this whole summer, but if and when things die down I strongly recommend it!

Since this was a special thing, I’m gonna do more rankings than I usually do in these tossed-off posts.

Rides Ranked By Overall Preference

1. Stardust Racers (Celestial Park)³

2. Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment (Dark Universe)⁴

3. Mine-Cart Madness (Super Nintendo Land)⁵

4. Hiccup’s Wing Gliders (Isle of Berk)⁶

5. Curse Of The Werewolf (Dark Universe)⁷

6. Mario-Kart: Bowser’s Challenge (Super Nintendo Land)⁸

Everything 4 and above is great, everything 5 and above is good (aka only Mario-Kart is bad)

Rides Ranked By How Cool The Queue Is

1. Mario-Kart: Bowser’s Challenge⁹

2. Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment¹⁰

3. Mine-Cart Madness¹¹

4. Hiccup’s Wing Gliders¹²

5. Stardust Racers

6. Curse Of The Werewolf

Rides I Did Not Experience, and therefore Can Not Rank:

• Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry (Ministry of Magic)¹³

• Yoshi’s Adventure (Super Nintendo Land)

• Dragon Racer’s Rally (Isle of Berk)

• Fyre Drill (Isle of Berk)

• Constellation Carousel (Celestial Park)

• Le Cirque Arcanus (Ministry of Magic)

• The Untrainable Dragon (Isle of Berk)

Lands Ranked

1. Dark Universe¹⁴

2. Super Nintendo Land¹⁵

3. Ministry Of Magic¹⁶

4. Isle of Berk¹⁷

5. Celestial Park¹⁸

Food & Drink Ranked

1. Café L’Air de la Sirène (Ministry of Magic)¹⁹

2. The Plastered Owl (Celestial Park)

3. CelesTiki (Celestial Park)

4. Pizza Moon (Celestial Park)

5. Spitfyre Grill (Isle of Berk)

And finally, the most important…….

My Current Ranking Of Theme Parks I’ve Been To (and can adequately remember because I’ve been there in the last, say, 15 years)

1. Disneyland (Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, CA)

2. California Adventure (Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, CA)

3. Disneyland Paris (Disneyland Paris Resort, Paris, FR)

4. Hollywood Studios (Walt Disney World, Orlando, FL)

5. Magic Kingdom (Walt Disney World, Orlando, FL)

6. Islands of Adventure (Universal Orlando Resort, Orlando, FL)

7. Epic Universe (Universal Orlando Resort, Orlando, FL)

8. EPCOT (Walt Disney World, Orlando, FL)

9. Universal Studios (Universal Orlando Resort, Orlando, FL)

10. Knott’s Berry Farm (Buena Park, CA)²⁰

11. California’s Great America (Santa Clara, CA)

12. Hersheypark (Hershey, PA)

13. Walt Disney Studios (Disneyland Paris Resort, Paris, FR)

14. Silverwood (Coeur d’Alene, ID)

15. Six Flags Great Adventure (Jackson, NJ)

16. Six Flag Great America (Gurnee, IL)

17. Wild Waves (Federal Way, WA)

²¹

1. But crucially, we were not the bratty kind of preview guest who kept constantly complaining about things being down or taking too long or whatnot (with one exception that I’ll get to.) It’s a preview! There’s signs saying stuff won’t work! “But I paid full price for a ticket 😭” no one forced you at gunpoint to do that!!!! What are you being so entitled for!!!!!

2. Also, a learning from my textbook, it’s very important when opening a new theme park to plan for expansion from the get-go, a lesson that (understandably) Disneyland for instance needed to learn the hard way! So it’s presumably smaller so that they have room to grow in the coming decades (adding a new Harry Potter ride, adding new (or expanding existing) lands on either side of Nintendo World, etc)

3. A blast of a coaster: it’s dueling tracks that run simultaneously. I don’t like it as much as Velocicoaster over at IoA, though where that has more speed, thrills, and a cooler view of the park, this does have more airtime and I love a specific moment where the two trains corkscrew past each other. Still great, a few slots lower on the ranking! But my biggest feedback is if Universal is going to sell Power-bands for use in the Nintendo world and (for some inexplicable reason?) claim that those bands need to be stored in a locker before riding, then they need to make that so much clearer than they did. It didn’t hit us because we didn’t get the bands, but every time we rode we saw at least 3 people get turned away at the metal detector for their bands, which is crazy because you’re the ones selling them and there’s no obvious reason why an Apple watch is allowed but a Power band is not (there may be a real reason! But you need to make that crystal clear!)

4. Incredibly fun: it’s Forbidden Journey but “what if we made the whole ride out of the dementor attack scene?”, in that you journey through Victoria Frankenstein’s castle as all the monsters escape. The animatronics are unbelievably good. And it completely solved my nausea problem I had on Forbidden Journey, in that it:

1. never had any moments where your whole field of view is taken up by screens (there’s always at least some physical set that grounds you),

2. the screen scenes are short (5 seconds max) and you move past them quickly, and

3. there are no screen scenes where they simulate motion, like in the Quidditch or dragon sections of Forbidden Journey. Instead you’re watching characters move in a static background.

I never got even a hint of motion sickness (vs Forbidden Journey I had to close my eyes for all of the screen sections.)

My only knocks are the projected face of Victoria in the pre-show is way worse than the true animatronics in the ride, Dracula is not really that scary (especially in comparison to all the other monsters), and it ends pretty quickly and kinda anti-climactically. Still incredibly good though!!

5. Charming Donkey-kong themed mine-cart coaster! I don’t want to spoil too much, but it’s very inventive with it’s track elements and show scenes. The only knock is the first half is pretty rough in how it shakes you around; hopefully that’s tweakable either in ride programming or ride maintenance? But this was our first and last ride of the day and it’s definitely better at night (it really benefits from the lighting.)

6. Baby Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure!!! Also charming, loved it, also better at night.

7. This was fine; it’s a spinning coaster, and perfectly thrilling, but could desperately use like one Wolfman figure (even a static one) somewhere in the ride to amp up the theming. Also spinning coasters are spoiled for me now having done Crush’s Coaster at Disneyland Paris, which is the peak of the form.

8. The AR stuff sucks. Straight up bad. And I watched a ride through of it without any of the AR, and this would be a full 2 letter grades higher if you had the exact ride but without the goggles. If we go again later this year, I am going to consider (depending on how long the wait is) just taking them off at the start of the ride and I am positive I’ll like it significantly more.

9. In contrast, the queue is incredible! You descend into Bowser’s castle and it’s just completely chock full of whimsical cartoon set pieces and funny jokes, especially in the library sequence. Lovely!

10. Also excellent, but in a spooky way. There’s a section I loved where they show found footage clips of all the classic Universal monsters in modern day and it’s so much more affecting and successful than that sentence would make it sound! Genuinely spooky!

11. Much less impressive than the other two, but there’s a fun Cranky Kong animatronic.

12. Nothing really of interest in these last three queues.

13. Okay this is the big one, and the one complaint I do have: the Virtual Line system for getting into Battle at the Ministry is totally busted (this was my main piece of feedback when I filled out Universal’s little survey!) I’m actually okay with it being busted for previews, that’s what previews are for, but I worry based on hearing how it’s busted in a similar way to Hagrid’s initial virtual line in 2019 that this is what it’ll be launching with, and in that context totally unacceptable for real non-preview customers. The fact that there are multiple videos and blog posts about how in order to get a queue slot you need to stay on one page for three hours and keep your phone from locking and then toggle back and forth your party size and blah blah blah is a huge indictment of the system, regardless of whether those “tips” even work! The fact enough people think that’s the only way shows that at minimum it feels like a wildly unfair system, which is not what you want!!

Oh also fuck JK Rowling, obviously.

14. What can I say, I like the spooky-scaries.

15. It is just stunning, and has an incredible control of viewing angle, especially in your initial entry to the land: whoever storyboarded the initial entrance did so immaculately, I giggled like a child as we walked through and I do think it’s maybe the single coolest land entrance sequence I’ve ever experienced.

16. If we get to ride Battle at the Ministry and it’s as good as everyone says, I imagine this will bump up a few slots, because I am blown away by how good the Paris of it all looks. It has much more of a sense of scale and depth than say EPCOT, the commitment to exclusively using French is charming, and I have a cliched but genuinely emotional attachment to the architecture and design of Paris, especially the Hausmannian stuff! But we didn’t get to ride the only ride, so it slots below Dark Universe and Super Nintendo Land for now.

17. Don’t take the fact it’s 4/5 as a knock, this is also exceptional! Really charming, really detailed, and a perfect family land. I’ve just never seen the movies so I have less connection than the others!

18. I don’t really buy the “Celestial Park is an actual land, not just a hub world” argument Universal has been making in their press. I guess it’s a land in the same sense that Main Street USA + the hub is a land at Disneyworld, which is to say it is cohesive, it does have a lot of restaurants and shops, but it does serve a more transitional purpose than any of the other spokes in the hub + spoke design. It does have an e-ticket ride, which is obviously different than Disneyland, but still it definitely reads as “hub world with a cool ride” more than land in its own right.

19. That’s right, we’re finally publicizing the theme park food instagram account

20. This I need to re-visit as an adult, I’m sandbagging it a bit because I loved it as a kid but haven’t been in the longest out of all of these listed.

21. Meaning I’m excluding ones I went to as a kid and can’t really fairly compare:

• Busch Gardens Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA)

• Legoland California (Carlsbad, CA)

• Legoland Windsor (Windsor, UK)

• Universal Studios Hollywood (Hollywood, CA) (I think; I have a distinct memory of the bridge collapse and the flood scene from the Universal Tram Tour, so that implies it must have been California, since research suggests those scenes never made it to Florida (plus we visited SoCal almost annually as a kid, vs Florida maybe once, so the likelihood of it being California is pretty strong.)

• Enchanted Forest (Turner, OR)

• Oaks Amusement Park (Portland, OR)

• Mall of America (Bloomington, MN)

• one of the SeaWorlds (probably California?)

• probably some other Six Flags or Cedar Fair park at some point (pretty sure at minimum Six Flags New England back when we lived in Boston?)

• (also not gonna count The London Dungeon as a theme park, though it is a multi-”attraction” themed space so I guess it’s borderline.)