China 01/24 – Fantawild Wonderland
From Suzhou to Xuzhou, another train took us bright and early to our next destination the following morning. Understandably I had already become rather paranoid about nothing opening at this point, and now the weather had turned from borderline ‘mild’ to downright cold. Sure enough the website for the park in question suddenly changed their opening hours on the website from 10:00 – 17:00 to ‘TBC’ since I had last checked.
Nah.
Nah…
Fantawild won’t let me down.
Day 3 – Fantawild Wonderland
Aside from the driver getting lost and nearly losing the bottom of the car on a poorly tracked reroute, we arrived without hitch into the cold embrace of yet another fresh-faced Fantawild establishment. I’m home.
Most likely known here as ‘the Fantawild with the rollercoaster Six Flags Great Adventure are getting‘, this was the most significant park to be dropped from my last itinerary and is another uniquely branded establishment. For now.
And it excites me. They’ve got this. Wizard’s Academy is an old school Fantawild dark ride by now, it generally opened with the Dreamland parks and the last one was in 2015 – quite literally an entire lifetime of these establishments ago. The old one was good, not great, as only the second generation of clones of their 4D motion based car rides.
What I really wanted to know was is this version new and/or different? Are they building on past experiences? Do they have a creative team with a semblance of thought and care?
Yes.
The wizard himself has changed to begin with. A bit less Dumbledalf and he can turn into an owl now. The same premise ensues, you go on a bit of an adventure through a realm of castles, magic and dangerous creatures. It was never clear if the guy is good or evil before and the ambiguity remains, opening with some straight up murder of other virtual guests. He gets you out of a few tight spots though and you end up in a treasure room – I guess money was the end goal.
Nope. That huge octopus over the entrance was obviously a clue to something and boom, he kicks the wizard’s ass all over the shop amongst the pile of gold. You narrowly escape and then team up against a big rock bloke and then earn some riches somehow anyway to finish. And no diploma of magic school this time. We weren’t here to learn.
It was a lot of fun, definitely of superior quality these days and I personally loved going on that journey from old to new, mainly because I obsess over this stuff.
Next up we had what on the surface appears to be related to another legacy dark ride – Dragon King’s Tale, but this is called Adventures in Dragon Palace or words to that effect. Should have looked closer at the low res pictures online though, because that’s clearly not Nezha, the protagonist of that old attraction, riding a fish. I still don’t know who he is exactly, some playful caretaker bloke, also of magical descent.
Him. This was quite the journey of discovery, half expecting some tracked dark ride again. We got a preshow – a rare treat as they often don’t bother to run them due to the conflicting schedules of the park either being dead, or stupidly busy. The former, it was the former.
The preshow gave away nothing other than a hall full of magic doors, and Chengyu – a name for four-word Chinese phrases that teach life lessons. They’ve come up on other Fantawild rides in the past, namely the evolution of the ‘small world’ boat rides in many parks. There’s some sort of edutainment aspect to it, the nuances of which are lost on me but the gist of it is that each magic door is tied to a phrase and leads somewhere, and you can only travel between them by using the last word of the current one as the first word of the next one. Often times during the ride he encourages the spelling out of these words and you get a simulated on-board audio of some children replying back.
Oh, the ride. I didn’t know what it was, the preshow ended and then we were heading up these long ramps back and forth just like their flying theatres. Hang on a minute. They have a flying theatre here. And it isn’t this. At the top of various ramps you enter some side rooms to discover that it’s little 8-person simulator pods – the ones that rise up into a big communal screen à la the obnoxious Simpsons ride.
Not the most thrilling of hardware but dare I say the best iteration of this type of attraction that I’ve come across out there. It was just really nice, pleasant, I don’t think there are better words for it. A colourful, creative, imaginative romp through these phrases and worlds. You get spooked by the big dragon, you break the moon, you come into some money (again) and the phrase that brings it full circle and gets you home(?) involves riding the fish, just like the ride exterior.
As a break from dark rides for a second, there was a burning question in the back of my mind. Are the rollercoasters running?
Yes, yes they are.
Let us take a moment to appreciate here that it was 1°C. 1°C. There’s a sign outside the ride that says it MAY not operate in temperatures below 2°C (and sandstorms, Xuzhou sounds violent). There were at best 50 guests on park. Instead of using all of those factors and more to not bother running one of your star attractions, like so many other stupid places, Fantawild have got your back. Except in Ningbo.
Vekoma’s first Super Boomerang then, or #1 Cloud Shuttle. There’s a bit of an identity crisis, I’m not sure what the theme is, if anything. No park narrative that I can tell, it’s loosely styled to racing but who are you racing? And why are you going backwards? Details. I guarantee it still looks better than the Flash one will. Why is he going backwards?
Mmm, vests. Or rather, Mmm, LSMs. I will first point out how much I appreciated the use of the technology here, as it launches through the station on these it also uses them to re-enter and park in the most satisfying manner ever. There’s the crawl of braking as you come back in at the end of the sequence, a sudden realisation of ‘hang on a minute, we can use this to our advantage’, a burst of acceleration to the end of the platform and then stops perfectly on a pin. So the literal opposite of those GCIs when they playfully pinch a million times while parking.
The initial triple launch is fine, bit of a non event for me. It begins with a tap of the head again, sad to see that’s back after I thought they had fixed it for good on the Top Gun model. Train size maybe, or I’m getting my timelines crossed.
The element it leads into though is a bit of a mind blower. The hang. The stall. (The left). It’s unprecedented as far as I can tell. It shouldn’t go on that long. It’s unnatural, unnerving. It looks weird and it is. It feels like you’re upside down for as long as the crest of a Sky Loop, maybe more so, but entirely without the associated unpleasantness. As a man who has become immune to even the greatest of RMC stalls, this is nothing short of masterful.
Out of that you get the double up, airtime portion of the ride. It kicks really well in the front, I was wearing a ton of winter gear including woolly hat and immediately felt that start to come off in this sequence and had to grab on for safety. Don’t Klotten me now.
In the back it’s a bit of a dud, so front row 4 life.
This inversion happens unceremoniously and you get a weird tiny burst of LSM boost again in the valley, to ensure satisfactory completion of the sequence. It’s a new thing I’m noticing and I don’t like it. Mandrill Mayhem did it. The new Manta did it. This did it. Short, faffy bursts of unsatisfying acceleration to meet a particular threshold. For someone who likes their coasters to feel out of control, it’s too controlling, too calculated, too soulless, too suboptimal. Like an inverse trim. Just design the coaster to do what it needs to do using old mate gravity, without interference. That’s the dream.
Anyway, I didn’t find the vertical spikes all that and it’s likely due to a lack of openness in the train/restraint setup. The second one just kinda happened to me and then you start the whole thing in reverse. Inversion, zing, inversion, good airtime, ridiculous stall, brakes, cool park job.
Sooo, it’s alright. Mid-tier modern Vekoma. It does things I like, but it doesn’t quite get me going. I wasn’t running back for more, nor was I dissatisfied with the experience. I had fun and was glad I got to try it. And now no doubt it will be a sufferance stateside, not least in that I won’t be getting a train to myself. Mmm, clones.
Suddenly back in the mood for creds we moved round and ticked off the obligatory #2 Puppy Coaster. Now we’re talking.
And shortly after, every park has to have a Vekoma junior by the name of #3 Pine Tree Rockets these days.
More exclusivity though, I noticed something was a little different on board and sure enough this is a new layout, dubbed the Kalypso, currently only at Tayto Park and taking longer to build than Hyperion and Zadra combined at Energylandia, so stay tuned for that one.
This is Boonie Bear Adventure, another of their shooting dark rides, using trains with buzz lightyear stick swivel, with different theming. I’m yet to come across two the same so far.
Most notable feature of this one was that you could shoot some screens as well as targets, which helped against my previous comments on another about every shot being worth the same amount of points being a bit un-competetive. To the point that ALL the points came from the screens however, there was one with a spider that was massively MVP.
Had to do just one of these generic Let’s Fly Flying Theatres this trip to remind myself about the annoyingly repetetive music and lack of care I have for them. To be fair they’re not so bad, the last one just put me in a right mood, or rather, the other guests did.
Also knuffelbeers.
Confession, I’ve always taken the words ‘Boonie Bear Theatre‘ literally and assumed it was some costumed stage show for kids. There’s at least 15 installations of the things at this point and I’ve walked past a ton of them, never on my radar.
The only version I have done was Manila Manila, famed for its singing manatee, at the ASEAN themed park and it’s one of those, a revolving theatre system set within a combination of scenery and screenery that tells a story.
On today’s menu was a heart wrenching story from the Boonie Bears collection. One of them gets stranded back in the Jurassic period due to time travel shenanigans, where he ends up saving this annoying baby bird from certain death.
I’m struggling here.
The bird continues to follow him from this moment on, despite being instructed not to and they end up becoming the best of friends over a few more adventures together, through a montage in which much time passes. The bird is all big and grown up now and the roles become reversed.
The other bear and the lumberjack bloke who invented the time machine eventually manage to travel back and find him to bring him back, but they get attacked and lose the device. The bird returns the favour at long last and saves them all. And then they have to leave him behind to go back to the future and it’s devastating.
I cried. And am trying very hard not to again now while writing about it at work. God damn Fantawild.
You don’t get this from high tech all terrain vehicles.
Weird tangent, but this is something I first clocked at the National Space Centre in Leicester when experiencing their excellent, multi-faceted themed experience including simulator, details here. It ends with a moment of self-sacrifice from one of the featured characters and I specifically remember being very taken aback by that being in the narrative. The emotional beats of say, a good Pixar film, aren’t something you find much in a theme park, if at all. And I’m totally here for it. Maybe that’s because people don’t want to be reminded about death and friendship in theme parks, much like I don’t want to be informed about the Chinese going to war with the Japanese last century, ride after ride. The majority of experiences are incessantly good beats evil, or entirely inconsequential.
Overthinking? Probably.
I now own the baby bird anyway.
Two for one on Fantawild cats. Should have a POV for you at some point.
I’ve lost track of where the day went at this point, err, River of Tales. I said this earlier.
Chengyu – a name for four-word Chinese phrases that teach life lessons. They’ve come up on other Fantawild rides in the past, namely the evolution of the small world boat rides in many parks.
This is that.
See.
They’ve become a lot more than small world rides to be fair to them, projections and other styles of scenery for the storytelling are all in the mix too.
This is Origin of Life, another legacy attraction that’s always been a 3D film about, well, the origin of life. I don’t remember it being particularly good though, I think they’ve improved the storytelling, or at very least the visuals and screen/projector technology because it looked great here. There was this one gorgeous shot of a T-rex stumbling through an apocalyptic landscape, looking up and seeing that it was seconds away from asteroid-based destruction and simply uttering the most desperate and primal roar back up at the asteroid in response, through lack of other options. That’s really stuck with me.
This was a show about ancient times, in which some old general bloke goes off to fight in wars, then comes back and is distressed about how the times have changed in his home village, along with the dynamic amongst his friends and relatives. He’s worried about how his legacy won’t live on.
Once again there’s a lot of these, but they’re all different between most parks and tailored to more local themes and legends. There’s two projections, one with a magic mirror trick and actors/dancers/performers in between the two. This is probably the best one of them I’ve seen so far, the most engaging and I think well performed. It had a cracking soundtrack, have since found the title track on youtube and will be rocking it for the foreseeable.
Think that’s just about it for this park. We have swinging ships at home.
I adored this visit, if you can’t tell. First couple of days of the trip were pretty trash and as ever had me thinking why do I put up with this nonsense? Leave it to these parks to bring me right back to why I do it. In the absence of world beating rollercoasters to ride, this is my jam and I don’t want these types of experiences to end.