What it’s like to visit Tokyo DisneySea

I’m on my first ever trip to Japan and while I’m spending the week soaking up as much typical 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’m a bit of a Disney nerd as I grew up about 20 minutes from Disneyland, which meant I got to go fairly often as a kid. As an adult I’ve come to appreciate their experience design and I still try to visit the California parks about once a year. These days, I mostly go to soak up the vibes more than rides.

I know from the history of Tokyo Disneyland that a company licensed park designs from Disney to build parks in Asia separately as a new franchise. I’d always heard DisneySea was their crowning glory 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 upfront: DisneySea totally and completely blew me away and lived up to its reputation, with every inch of the park feeling carefully designed to a level I’ve never seen anywhere else.

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 I would 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 ride ticket for 3pm.

It was funny to watch everyone go through the turnstiles but then whip out their phones to immediately try getting passes for popular rides.

The park entry ticket was only $60USD, but I ended up spending about another $100 on ride passes and food throughout the day. Compared to California parks, this is a bargain, where normally it’s at least $150 to get in plus you spend about that much more on food and even more for ride passes. This being a special trip that was thousands of miles away and me having just one day to enjoy it, I bought passes for every ride I could to cut my time spent in lines so I could have more time on rides.

One last tip: you can hold several overlapping Disney Premier Access passes but you can only purchase one pass per hour, so set an alarm for 59 minutes after each time you get a new ride pass, so you can grab another when 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 the metal siding had a little rusty patina streak below, as if from decades of rain. The interiors of ride buildings had meticulously stained and weathered wood, stuff I know from woodworking takes many 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 like if an obsessive gigantic person built an ultimate model railway village featuring towns from all over the world, but 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 in 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 lot of walk-through attractions you usually find while wandering, since I was mostly moving from land to land to look for the rides.

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 each had working eyebrows and eyes that tracked your boat while they sang tunes, with some characters having projections and special lighting too.

About a year ago, I was on the Small World ride in Disneyland when it broke down and we were stuck for 20 minutes on it (including the music loop). I got to see up close that most of the ride has a simple painted plywood background and most of the characters are styrofoam and move left and right and don’t do much else. Honestly it reminded me of rides you’d see at county fairs.

I know the ride is from the 1964 World’s Fair and people love nostalgia for stuff 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 they never did.

The new Frozen ride blew me away with a long, detailed story and interesting ride vehicles. It features some of the most lifelike and incredible animatronics I’ve ever seen. The ride also wasn’t all joy and happy songs—it didn’t shy away from the struggles between the sisters in the film, with scenes featuring pain, guilt, and abandonment as themes.

The looping roller coaster, while way 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 aspects near the end. That ride and the submarine ride were fun little Jules Verne type stories that really felt like they were designed by someone from the late 1800s who didn’t know the real science of deep sea creatures and guessed what lives below.

The Peter Pan ride was surprisingly awesome. It was a bit like Star Tours with lots of motion and movies and they did a great job focusing your view so you were always looking at giant screens ahead of you while flying throughout the story without accidentally seeing any other scenes too early.

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 new ending that flies over Tokyo and the DisneySea park at night (honestly, every year that everyone has easy access to cheap 4K drone technology, the Soarin’ ride’s actual films feel less impressive).

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 before they closed it after sunset, which was a great viewpoint to see all the park’s lands and a good way to watch the park transform as night fell.

The park is REALLY good at the transition to darkness, with thoughtful, colorful lighting 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 done to an insanely 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 incredibly intricate inside and out, with every beam and ceiling hand-painted to look as if it’s always been that way.

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 done so well that you can figure out what’s going on during the times you are hearing Japanese spoken.

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

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

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

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 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).

The map 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 pretty weird and it was tough to look up menus at restaurants, then jump back into looking up ride closures or buy passes. I was constantly running into dead-ends within the app and having to relaunch it to get back to a useful starting point.

One of the best aspects of the park’s design is their controlled use of sightlines. The lands are all separate because the horizon is carefully obscured by backdrops and brickwork and buildings in every land 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 satisfying immersive experience, but it also made navigating the park surprisingly difficult. When I couldn’t spot anything unique on the horizon, I tended to walk in circles and get “stuck” inside a land. 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 me way 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 helping you. There were several times I was stuck in the Arabian castle and couldn’t figure a way out. 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 an IKEA with someone who works there that 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 was 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 (probably a reference to elsewhere like Portugal?).

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 get why they do it, because it would be hard to know if someone actually works inside the park or is instead a fan dressed really well. It does get a little weird in the Star Wars land in California’s Disneyland where they seem to have relaxed the rules to the point that I often can’t tell if someone in a Star Wars getup works for Disney or is just some guy who sewed his own robes.

It’s currently the start of Halloween season at DisneySea, so the display of cosplay was incredible, with dozens of people among the crowds dressed up as if they were at 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 the other 20 or 30 Annas and Elsas I saw throughout the day. 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 say “that dude is maybe hitting it 80%, his goatee isn’t quite right, there’s a guy whose costume is hitting around 95% also walking around”.

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

The overall lasting impression

I’d heard from theme park nerds online was that this was the best designed theme park on earth, and I have to say it really is true. I was worried they oversold it, that I wouldn’t be impressed, or it would be overblown. If anything, people undersold how deeply thought out and designed the park really is, I really can’t imagine the amount of work, money, and time that went into building this park.

The food was also pretty great considering it’s an amusement park and that bar is 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 the park and saw a long line that was seemingly nowhere near a ride, it was always people lined up for a custom flavor of 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 each 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. Due to the park layout and slight language barrier, chances are you might occasionally jump on the wrong ride and you may wonder what the introductory safety talk is saying before you get into a ride vehicle, but you will definitely have a good time and be wowed by all the design choices in the park no matter where you look.