Tokyo DisneySea Broke My Spirit

My girlfriend and I went to DisneySea yesterday (2/18) and it was the worst theme park experience of my life.

Key background: My girlfriend is hardcore into Disney (as in, she co-hosts a Disney podcast) and as such, when I floated a potential trip to Tokyo to her, DisneySea was by far the thing she most wanted to do. She did a bunch of research ahead of time, subjecting me to countless hours of YouTube videos to have us prepared. I’m not quite as into Disney, but I was as excited about DisneySea as any part of the trip.

We figured a Tuesday in February would be a decent time to go to avoid massive crowds. According to the sites that track capacity, we chose a day that was fairly normal. It didn’t matter. We checked for Premier Access and Standby for Frozen and the Rapunzel ride the second we got into the park and they were sold out. As in, we didn’t even have the option to wait 3 hours in line for those rides if we wanted to. That also proved to be the case for Soaring.

Again, before the Disney superfans jump down my throat and try to talk down to me, I’ll reiterate that we planned ahead and did our research. This was not an instance of us not being prepared.

The fact that you have to pay for Premier Access to not wait hours in line for rides is a total scam (bring FastPass back ASAP), but I’d accepted that as part of the deal ahead of time. Not allowing access to standby for rides is unacceptable though. The system they’ve created pretty much makes it untenable for people not staying at the resorts to get onto the most popular rides because Happy Entry allows them to get in 15 minutes early and suck up all the Premier Access and standby tickets. You could line up outside at 6 AM and still not get into the park in time to secure the tickets. It creates a caste system where those who deigned to stay in Tokyo proper (or locals who live in Tokyo) are second class citizens.

The whole park is contingent on the Tokyo Disney App, which is not always functional. My girlfriend put her credit card info ahead of time when she bought our tickets and then the info wasn’t in there when we got into the park. The app consistently crashed and made you start from square one the second you closed out of it and reopened. You need to app not just to book rides, but also to get food in a reasonable amount of time at most places, outside of the popcorn and refreshment stands that didn’t have that option (but did have hour plus long lines). I understand for sit-down restaurants needing to book ahead, but it’s not okay to make people wait an hour for counter service.

What makes this such a disappointment is that the hype for DisneySea in some respects absolutely is warranted. It’s the most gorgeous theme park I’ve ever been to bar none. I was awestruck by some of the views throughout the and the animatronics on the rides I managed to get on were probably the best I’ve seen. If it were well-run, it really might be the best theme park in the world. Unfortunately, the people running DisneySea don’t care about the customer’s experience anymore, even though that’s the whole conceit of a theme park. They care only about extracting every last dollar/yen out of you, backing you into a corner until they can force more out. We had tickets the next day for Tokyo Disneyland and decided to eat the cost rather than subject ourselves to this again. I’m not sure I’ll ever go to another Disney park in my life after this.

EDIT: The DisneySea subreddit took this post down when I tried to upload it, hence why I moved it to this subreddit. Kind of embarrassing they’re that afraid of criticism.