What it’s like to visit Tokyo DisneySea

I’m currently on my first ever trip to Japan and while I’m spending the week soaking up as much Japanese culture as I can, I wanted to take a one-day break into the fantasy world and see what Tokyo DisneySea was like.

I grew up about 20 minutes from the original Disneyland, which meant I got to go fairly often as a kid. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the experience design of the place and I try to visit the California parks about once a year, mostly to soak up the vibes more than rides.

I know the history of Tokyo Disneyland is that a company licensed park designs from Disney to build parks in Asia as a new franchise. I’d always heard DisneySea was their crowning achievement among all their parks, and that it was a blank-check, nothing-is-off-limits type of theme park, so I had high expectations going in.

I’ll kill any suspense and put my conclusion here: DisneySea totally and completely blew me away and lived up to this reputation, with every inch of the park feeling carefully designed at a level I’ve never seen anywhere else. The rest of this post explains why.

Getting there, initial impressions

It’s pretty easy to buy a pass in the Tokyo Disney app a day or two before your trip, and lucky for me I stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of Tokyo near DisneySea, making it only a 30min train trip for me. Another stroke of luck was I went on a Monday that wasn’t a holiday, so the park was only mostly full.

The park opens at 9am and people online say you should line up around 6:30am to get in first. I waited until around 9:30 to arrive, hoping to miss the initial crush, but there was a huge security checkpoint line that took about 15 minutes to get through, with a few minutes in an entry line after.

The opening scramble

The time you enter the park is important because you can’t book any Fast Passes (Disney Premier Access is what they call it these days) until you get beeped through the park’s front gates. You’ll also need to store a credit card in the app to streamline purchases, which adds another few minutes.

Everything I read online told me if I wasn’t inside the park by 9:15am I wouldn’t be able to buy a ticket to the new Frozen ride since it sells out so quickly. Thankfully for my trip on a rainy Monday, I was able to buy a pass for it around 9:45am and it gave me a ticket for 3pm.

It was funny to watch everyone go through the turnstiles but then stop, look down, and whip out their phones to try getting passes for popular rides. Immediately inside the park gates there were like a hundred “zombies” doing this (myself included) the moment they entered. The park should probably make a little area with benches to let people sit and tap for a few minutes in a little corral.

The park entry ticket was only $60USD, and I spent about another $100 on ride passes and food throughout the day. That may sound expensive but compared to California parks, this was a bargain, where normally it’s at least $150 to get in plus you spend that much on food and even more on top for ride passes. If I go to California parks once a year, spending $300-500 isnide the park on a single day can be completely normal. This being a special trip, thousands of miles away with just one day to enjoy it, I bought passes for almost every ride I could to cut my time spent in lines, allowing me to experience more rides.

One last tip: you can hold several overlapping Disney Premier Access passes but you can only purchase one pass per hour, so set a timer for 59 minutes whenever you get a new ride pass so you can grab another immediately after the limit is lifted.

Design considerations

Like I said, every inch of the park is well designed. As I strolled through the fake New York town near the entrance, every rivet on metal siding had a little rusty patina streak hand-painted below, as if from decades of rain. The interiors of ride buildings had meticulously stained and weathered wood, stuff I know from my own woodworking takes hours to artfully reproduce even at a small scale. Entire building interiors were done like this and I can’t imagine how much time and labor went into it.

DisneySea is kind of like if an obsessive gigantic person built their ultimate model railway village featuring towns from all over the world, and it just so happens to be life-sized perfection to us.

Here are some examples.

There is literally no stone left unturned. Every wall, every bit of trim, even the flooring is all considered and fits into an area’s theme. The pre-ride areas are lush with details, even something as mundane as the rooftop inside a tunnel where you queue up for a ride has perfect weathering and patina applied to look like it’s been there since Victorian times.

Ride impressions

I had a wishlist of rides I wanted to try after reading a few reviews online and I was surprised that by the end of my ~10am-8pm day, I hit every single one of them. You can do the whole park in a day, though I missed out on a few walk-through attractions you usually find while wandering, since I was mostly moving from land to land to look for the rides. I barely touched the Cape Cod area and only got to see the Mexico themed spot for a moment while passing through.

A big bummer: The best Tower of Terror ride on earth is here but was closed, and Indiana Jones was closed as well so I couldn’t do either of those to compare them to the US parks.

The rides themselves carry the deep design I saw throughout the park and had great queues. I had a fun time on every ride, but if I had to pick something to criticize, it’d be that some rides (Raging Spirits, Journey to the center of the earth, Tangled’s Lantern ride) are too short of a ride length. This stood out to me because often the queues were over two hours (I bought passes for these or used the single rider option) and while they were great rides, each felt like it was over in 60-90 seconds, much too quickly for all the time people spent waiting for it.

My favorite ride was an underrated one I would have skipped unless I read about how good it was, and that was the Sinbad Seven Seas ride. It had one of the shortest lines of the day and the ride itself was ridiculously long, probably on the order of 15 minutes as a boat ride. Honestly, it was everything that a modern version of It’s A Small World could be. There were hundreds of animatronics in room after room, and every single one had working eyebrows and eyes that tracked your boat while they sang tunes, with some characters having projections and special lighting too.

A couple years ago, I was on the It’s a Small World ride in Disneyland when it broke down and we were stuck for 20 minutes. I got to see up close that most of the ride has simple painted plywood backgrounds and the characters are styrofoam and move left and right and don’t do much else. Honestly it reminded me of a ride you’d see at a county fair.

I know that old ride is from the 1964 World’s Fair and people love nostalgia even when it feels dated, but DisneySea’s Sinbad ride was last revamped in 2007. Any ride at Disneyland in California could have adopted this kind of technology at any point in the last 20 years, but didn’t.

The new Frozen ride blew me away with a long, detailed story and interesting ride mechanics. It features some of the most lifelike and incredible animatronics I’ve ever seen. The ride also wasn’t pure joy and happy songs as it didn’t shy away from scenes with pain, guilt, and abandonment as themes. I thought that was a bold move.

Raging Spirits, The looping roller coaster, while too short of ride, was really fun and beautifully designed with an interesting use of smoke to obscure the track before you hit big dips and bends. Journey to the Center of the Earth was a cool ride akin to the Indiana Jones rides at other parks, but with some added roller coaster elements near the end. That ride and the submarine ride were fun little Jules Verne-type stories that felt like they were designed by someone from the late 1800s who didn’t know modern science and guessed at what lives below.

The Peter Pan ride was surprisingly awesome. It was a bit like Star Tours with lots of motion simulation sync’d to video and they did a great job focusing your view so you were always looking at the screen ahead of you while flying throughout the story.

The Tangled Lantern ride was ridiculously short, but the final scene was worth the experience of floating through it.

Soarin’ was the same worldwide flyover film from other parks, but with a custom ending that flies over Tokyo and the DisneySea park at night. Honestly, every year that we have easy access to cheap 4K consumer drones, Soarin’ feels less impressive as a ride concept.

I tried all day to get onto the steam ship tour around the park, as it was often closed but I caught one of the final boats around sunset, which was a great way to see the park’s lands and watch the park transform as night fell.

The park is REALLY good at the transition to darkness, with thoughtful, colorful lighting all over that highlights many of the best scenes in each land.

The new Frozen land

The new Frozen area of the park was incredible. It felt like it one-upped the Harry Potter lands that debuted in Universal parks about a decade ago. It was amazing to see a fake world from an animated film come to life and everything was executed to an incredibly high level.

The ride was great and worth the extra cost for a pass, but what really blew me away was the themeing throughout the area. Buildings were intricate inside and out, with every beam and ceiling hand-painted to look as if it’s always been that way.

I mean, just look at this closeup of the dining area ceiling and imagine how much work having this much detail requires. It’s simply amazing.

Is there a language barrier?

I had never been to an amusement park that wasn’t primarily in English and I wondered if I would miss out or not enjoy rides when I couldn’t understand what was being said. Overall, it didn’t really affect much as the visual storytelling is so well done that you understand what’s going on even when you’re only hearing Japanese spoken.

Still, it was pretty surprising that such a high-tech company that can build cutting-edge parks doesn’t piggyback on their existing park phone app to provide multiple languages for visitors.

Case in point: there’s an incredible translation app called TheaterEars that you can use in the US to hear a Spanish language track on current films in theaters, and it syncs to the existing movie using your phone’s microphone while you’re inside a theater. When someone in a film starts to speak, you‘ll hear the intended translation perfectly timed in your own headphones.

TheaterEars has been around for over a decade so the tech is established. DisneySea could likely sell even more tickets to foreign visitors if you could pop your AirPods in, tap a button, and hear any ride audio reproduced in Portuguese or French or whatever you needed.

The few downsides

Overall I had a great time at DisneySea, and there were just a few things that felt like they could be improved.

The biggest downside to me was the park’s iOS app for Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea. The app launches with a long boot sequence as it downloads a bunch of information in order to make it work. Even when I was on WiFi, this would take a solid minute or two before you could use the app. There was a small “skip” button to get into the app more quickly, but you would get an error message that “not all components were loaded properly” if you tried to do anything after. The app really needs to optimize for quicker loading.

The app crashed a few times on me and needed to be reloaded about once an hour (with another 2-3 minutes delay as it booted up). This got old quickly.

The map UI in the app was buggy and difficult to use for actual navigating around the park. Ride times were sometimes easy to find and other times impossible to seek out. The overall UI is weird and it was tough to look up menus at restaurants, then jump back into looking up ride closures or reserve new passes. I was constantly running into dead-ends in the app and I’d have to relaunch it to get back to a useful starting point. The US Disney park apps are way more straightforward and easier to navigate.

Another design issue: one of the best aspects of the park’s design is their controlled use of sightlines. The lands are visually separated because the horizon obscured by backdrops and brickwork and buildings so that you never accidentally see a rock or building from another land while you are inside a different land. That leads to a deeply immersive experience, but it was so effective that it made navigating the park surprisingly difficult. When I couldn’t spot anything unique on a horizon, I tended to walk in circles and get “stuck” inside a land with seemingly no way out. And since the app wasn’t so great at being a reliable map, eventually I learned to criss-cross the park by using Google Maps, which gave much more precise walking directions.

The park is situated around a few lagoons, and there are very specific bridges and ways to move from one land to another, but it was hard to know where to find those passages without an app directing you. There were several times I was stuck in the Arabian castle area, or the central volcano, and in the Little Mermaid areas and couldn’t figure a way out without checking a map. It took me all day to find the right spot for the steamer boats. Getting to the Frozen area in the back of the park was a 20 minute zig-zag between lands that reminded me of visiting IKEA with someone who works there and knows all the secret passageways to get from one end to the other quickly.

My favorite design references

I loved seeing familiar references from famous places recreated in the parks. Here are a handful of them:

There were elevated subway structures like you’d see all over New York City, the Rialto bridge from Venice, the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence, the decaying Colosseum of Rome, and tile mosaics that reminded me of the ones in Balboa Park in San Diego (which are probably a reference to somewhere else).

The large boat in the harbor looks like the Queen Mary for a very good reason. The history of DisneySea is that it was originally designed to be in Long Beach, California. Back in the 1980s, Disney wanted to turn Anaheim into more of an Orlando type vacation destination. I‘ve heard the original plans were: have Disneyland, buy oceanfront land in Long Beach to build DisneySea and include a real working cruise ship harbor. That way, families could see the original park, check out the new park, then jump on a Disney cruise line to Mexico or Alaska from there, the same way you can do all those things in Florida today.

I’ve heard the project was massive and Disney was low on cash in the 1980s so they shelved it, then sold the plans to the franchise company running parks in Asia, who built the park originally destined for California’s coast.

The Cosplay aspect

At American Disney Parks, there are strict rules that anyone over the age of 13 can’t dress up like a character, and I understand why they do it. It does get a little weird in the Star Wars land in California’s Disneyland where they seem to have relaxed those rules to the point that I often can’t tell if someone I see wearing a full Star Wars getup is an actor working for Disney or is just some guy who sewed his own elaborate robes. I could also see how it’d be confusing to parents and kids to not know who is a professional and who is not.

It’s currently the start of Halloween season at DisneySea, and the cosplay on display was incredible, with hundreds of people in the crowd dressed up as if they were attending something like San Diego’s comic con. The photo above was just one set of Anna and Elsas I saw that day, and honestly, I’d put them at middle of the road in terms of how extravagant compared to the other 20 or 30 Annas and Elsas I saw throughout the day. There were dozens and dozens of Jasmines from Aladdin all over the parks. It got to the point where me and my friends would say things like “did you see that Flynn Rider from Tangled over there?” then someone else in our group would chime in and say “that dude is maybe hitting 80% because his goatee isn’t quite right, there’s a guy whose costume is hitting around 95% perfect who I just saw walking by this area.”

There weren’t just extravagant cosplay outfits of Disney characters, as people dressed to the nines as lots of different anime characters I had to google to figure out, complete with chunky wigs and robes and all sorts of crazy boots. Given it was a hot, humid day, I was impressed at how fans showed up to the park.

Maybe the “no costumes” rule should be relaxed/removed from US parks? It seemed fine in DisneySea and was almost always clear to me who worked there and who didn’t.

The overall lasting impression

I’d heard from other theme park nerds was that this was the best designed theme park on earth, and I have to say that’s really true. I was worried they might have oversold it and I wouldn’t be impressed. If anything, people undersold how deeply thought out and designed the park really is, as I can’t imagine the amount of work, money, and time went into building this park. I heard the costs were in the billions and I believe it.

The food was also pretty great considering it’s an amusement park and that bar is normally very low. I had a ridiculously good curry in the Aladdin themed area, great meatballs in gravy in Frozen land, Oreo flavored churros, and got to sample one of the many different popcorns on offer. Whenever I was walking around and saw a long line that was unconnected to any ride, it was always people lined up for a custom flavored popcorn you could only get at that stall. It’s funny how DisneySea took the popcorn bucket collecting obsessions from other Disney parks and amped it up with custom flavors for every popcorn stall. I think there are about a dozen different popcorn flavors on offer these days inside this park.

If you’re a Disney or design nerd you won‘t be disappointed by a trip to DisneySea and I’d strongly recommend it. Due to the park layout and slight language barrier, there’s a chance you might occasionally jump on the wrong ride (as I did once) and you may wonder what the introductory safety talk is saying before you get into a ride vehicle, but you will definitely have a great time and be wowed by all the design choices in the park no matter where you look.