Super Nintendo World Was Very Cool, But Featured a Surprising Amount of Children Crying?

I did not anticipate our Nintendo theme park adventure would involve failure, and it’s related to an ongoing problem with Nintendo’s own games.

This wasn’t Nintendo’s fault, but dang, the sun was bright for this photo op.

You see a lot of crying at theme parks. The children do it on the outside, the parents do it on the inside. Theme parks are expensive, hot, and involve so much walking. Everyone is tired, everyone wants to do something slightly different. Emotions are running high, tempers flare, and the best solution to every problem costs money.

On vacation, our children cried a few times, and once, we thought about it, too! Where I did not expect to encounter so much crying, however, was while surrounded by Mario. I’ll get to that in a moment, but it’s worth explaining how we arrived at a line where every third kid was being consoled by their parents while a line worker sighed.

We spent last week mostly at Disneyland, but for one day, Universal Studios. Yes, yes, there’s an impressive Jurassic World ride and the ancient studio tour remains surprisingly interesting, but we were really there for one thing: Super Nintendo World.

Nintendo is one of those rare things where there’s crossover between my children and me. When the Mario movie came out, I wrote about how interestingly emotional the experience was, because it was a shared adventure. It’s rare for entertainment interests to overlap between parents and child so neatly, but Nintendo qualifies. 

From my piece at the time:

As a parent, I am philosophically opposed to forcefully passing my nostalgia to my children. They are their own people, not little versions of me, and while it’s impossible for elements of your identity, preferences, and values to not rub off on them—you know, a huge part of the “parenting” thing—it’s never been my intention to treat children as a vehicle to re-experience my own childhood. One reason I had children was to have new experiences, to view the world through their eyes. And yet, here I was, holding back a tear during a movie that rarely concerns itself with anything deeper than “Wa-hoo!” and noticing how I’d been undermined.

The moment we walked through that big green pipe—holy hell, man. I’ll remember that for years. My kids’ eyes were popping out of their sockets and my heart was full. 

Super Nintendo World is a neat place without a ton to do. It’s visually spectacular, but besides waiting hours in line for the (cool!) Mario Kart ride, enjoying the visuals is most of what Super Nintendo World has to offer unless you pay a $42ish tax—per person!—to purchase an arm band that lets you interact with coin blocks, activate hidden Marios, and most crucially, collect keys by participating in various games.

I was excited to be there, but no, I was not going to pay $200 for arm bands, however nifty they might be. Instead, we focused on the kids, knowing I could borrow them.

Obtaining three keys lets you (and thankfully, people in your party who did not pay extra for the bands) access to an extremely cool multiplayer activity called Bowser Jr.’s Shadow Showdown, where clever tech trickery is deployed to let players whip fireballs around the room and jump to unbelievable heights, just like Mario and his friends. 

The keys are locked behind activities that you wait in line for. They’re largely trivial for an adult, manageable for a teenager, and at times, shockingly hard for anyone under the age of 10. That difficulty only spikes harder the younger you get, getting to a point where few children will succeed without the hands-on assistance of a parent. 

Which brings us to the most important point: the kids can fail the games! This floored me. In fact, kids were regularly failing! Do you want to take a wild guess at what happens when a kid waits in a long line in the sun, only to publicly fail a game that’s gating access to another part of the park? They’re going to cry. A lot of them are going to cry. In the time I was watching one game, every third kid was ending up in tears! 

It’s possible my viewing experience was an outlier? Maybe some of the games were tuned weirdly that day, assuming they’re even able to change how they’re reacting?

I ended up in line with my oldest for an activity where all you’re asked to do is turn a crank. That’s it. Turn the crank, win the game. Easy! Now, I want to show a video:

That is a child turning a crank. Sure, at one point it’s clear she gets a little tired and slows down for a moment, but the crank has been turned. And yet she fails the game.

There’s a moment in the video, at the very end, where you can tell I’m putting the phone down, because I’m worried my kid is about to be the next one crying in front of a goomba. She did not, thankfully, but she was hurt and wanted to leave the area. (My youngest, however, only cried when we said they could only buy one toy at the shop.)

While waiting in line, the attendant was very specific on what could and could not happen. If a child chose to participate in the game, they had to do it on their own, without help. If a parent wanted to do the game for them, they could. You also could not swap out while the game started, even if it becomes clear they’re going to fail. I talked with one parent who said that when they visited another time, the attendant didn’t even allow parents to participate at all—only the kid with the arm band could.

Excuse me, but what?

On some level, I respect that Nintendo extended their approach to game design into their amusement park. On another level, I’ve paid a ton of money to be in this amusement park, and you’ve made my life harder. It’s reflective of issues Nintendo has had with accessibility, difficulty scaling, and other problems they’ve ignored for years.

In a video game, you can hit continue and give it another shot. At Super Nintendo World, it’s back to a line that, most likely, has gotten longer since you first got in it.

The next time, I turned the crank for her. It was not a satisfying conclusion!

At another activity, where you’re timing hitting of a POW block to take out an enemy, the attendant was just telling children when to hit the block, to ensure they would win. 

Gating a secret behind a series of skill-based activities players need to accomplish is such a cool idea! I just wish, much like I often wish with their video games, Nintendo had a better sense of the many different kinds of people who play their games, and found more elastic solutions to making them feel welcomed. It was not especially shocking to see this oversight also find its way into their amusement park design. 

I highly recommend watching this analysis video by Game Maker’s Toolkit, which examines how Nintendo handles similar issues throughout the Mario series. Nintendo does not usually have “easy” and “hard” modes, and weaves such options in invisibly.

When it works, it works. When it doesn’t, some fall through the cracks, like my youngest daughter did with Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and my oldest did with a real-life Nintendo obstacle. It’s OK for things to not be for everyone, but Nintendo presents as a company interested in everyone and can fail to live up to that lofty goal.

(Side note, I should ask Mark Brown, the creator of Game Maker’s Toolkit, if he has any ideas for possible solutions to this problem. Also, if you’ve worked in theme park design, or know anyone who has experience with it, I’d love to chat with you, as well! This extends to anyone who’s worked in Super Nintendo World, or even a place like it.)

It was very funny to watch some overly confident adults fail the games, however.

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

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Also:

• The Simpsons ride holds up! I convinced my daughter to give it a try, as we learn to like rollercoasters, and that one was such a blast. I’d have done it a few times.

• Toadstool Cafe is a little overrated! The food is fine by theme park standards, I suppose, but getting a spot is hard, and the lines inside are unfathomably long.

• If you go, go as early as possible, and pay extra to get in even earlier. It’s worth it, because you’ll be able to experience that part of the park without many lines.