China 04/24 – Oriental Legend

The more relaxed half of the trip was over and it was time to go rather hard in order to tick off a few of the more ‘unique’ Fantawilds I still had my eye on.
An early morning few hours on a train took us out of Jinan and over to Handan where, in the middle of nowhere, between two non-descript cities, this one lives.

Day 8 – Oriental Legend

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It all looks rather familiar however.

There are a lot of Oriental Heritages out there, 9 to be precise, but for some reason this park got its own separate designation, logo and branding. At heart, it’s pretty much the same as a middle-aged (2019) Heritage park, with a few different flourishes here and there.

Tick though.

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A pleasant sight on the right greeted us for what should have been the first ride of the day.
School trip season hit hard here, as we rounded the first corner to be greeted by a member of staff, and the sounds of several hundred school children in switchbacks. They advised we come back later. I do love a Magic Gallery, but I’m not queueing for it.

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Pressing on, they had a fairly early showing of Daydreams about to happen.

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Actors, magic projections, there’s so many of these now that it’s hard to keep track, but in this generation of park they do tend to be entirely unique to the local scene. I hadn’t come across it before anyway.

It told the story, back in the day, of a guy travelling to the big city to become learned and, by extension, rich and influential. Some bloke tells him to rest on a bench for a while and there he has an extended dream sequence laying out the possible outcomes of what he seeks to achieve. Basically it’s not all it’s cracked up to be – your beautiful wife won’t love you, some military General might get you in trouble, demon spirits could take you away from your child. Such is life.

He decides to keep it simple and goes back home to be happy instead.

Kids were making a bit of a racket, but it was a decent one of these. Thankfully we managed to avoid crossing paths with any school groups again, by means of some good tactics.

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I’ve skipped reriding this revolving theatre a good hundred times now, but we’ll get to one again at some point.

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This was rather unfortunate. Maybe a bit of learnedness does count for something.

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The mid-sized cred here is unlike any other at a Fantawild.

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It appears to be the same model as when Beijing Jiuhua made their own Mack Youngstar attractions and called them White Horse Coasters cos, you know, Pegasus.

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#1 Sky and Earth has the dragon from Legend of Nuwa on the front though, because Fantawild are better than that.

They ride with rather less gusto.

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Obligatory shout out to the painted service gates.

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Boat ride, Chengyu, 4 character phrases, life lessons.

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See?

We’ve been here before, but each and every installation of River of Tales appears to mix things up a bit with some local, specific or inspired choices.

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I had trouble finding the entrance to the main cred.

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It’s not through here.

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Yes, star of the show here is #2 Flying Dragon, another Vekoma Space Warp, or ‘lift-hill Formula, extended’.

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It’s a very respectable ride that would do well at a few places no doubt, but I felt like I was just going through the motions with it on this occasion. Can safely say it lacks the spark that Vekoma found not too long after.

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Rounding out the +1s was another Puppy Coaster, although it got upgraded to being called #3 Mountain Voyage here, not sure why.

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Interactive shooter Bears Mission caught our eye for having a similar sign up to Taizhou where we earned a badge by beating a target score.

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Here you could win a medal by getting 15,000 or more. And, more amusingly, you could win a trophy by getting 50 medals. I’m not that dedicated, yet.
Got the medal though.

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Let’s try again with Magic Gallery.

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Now a walk on, it’s also the first time I saw the pre-show playing for this particular version of the attraction (Brush Boy, not Belly Buddha), but didn’t get to see much.

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Plenty more queue to walk through anyway, I still remember the excitement and confusion of my first one of these, eventually heading into that station to find a trackless dark ride.

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Somewhere on a Chinese theme park blog, there may well be a picture of me taking this shot, posted by this guy. I wonder what the caption would be.

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My first ride on one of these was amazing, second was a little broken, then this one full on broke, but it was amazing for it.

After you go on a magic turntable and get this gorgeous reveal, the other car headed off into the trees while our one just got stuck in this position. All the media played out for them as they passed and then paused, waiting for our arrival that wasn’t happening.
After a minute at most, an engineer walked out of the shadows with a remote controller, stood just to the side and manually drove us off of the turntable and onto the ‘track’. It was the geekiest experience I’ve ever had with a ride out here and I loved it.

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The whole ride was a little bit skewed from here on, but I admire how clever the many systems were in being able to keep it mostly together. Everything still triggered as we headed round, out of sync with the rest of the world, until a moment near the end where you head into the ‘flying theatre’ segment that begins with a physical curtain reveal.
The curtain timing was off and closed in front of the car, which kept ploughing on almost as if it was going to crash or get tangled.
I got nervous, don’t want to break the thing.
Sensors kicked in thankfully and stopped it just short of the calamity, before the curtain opened again and it fixed itself once more. Added jeopardy.

Let us recall the visit to Warner Bros Abu Dhabi last year when I rode their Justice League thing after a long, rough queue, only for the cars to not rotate or have a functioning motion base. We saw absolutely nothing of what the attraction was supposed to be, facing the wrong way at every screen and it was a complete waste of time. The staff just laughed and offered nothing but ‘go queue again’.

Upon our arrival in the station for Magic Gallery, even though we hadn’t queued, the on-board delay was minimal, we still saw everything the attraction had to offer and, from a fan’s perspective, received what I’d consider an ‘enhanced experience’, the staff profusely apologised for the technical mishap and gave us a free souvenir rabbit as compensation.
<3

Bad Warner.

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OG red bloke punching blue bloke for Legend of Nuwa. Not that Sun Tribe rubbish.

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She’s still got it.

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I got confused in the dying moments of the day. Didn’t recognise this name. There was a closed off building at the other end of the park that was illustrated on the map with the magic door guy coming out the roof.

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This magic door guy. World Idiom was this simulator attraction again, I didn’t realise it was so prolific. Good though.

For fun we can compare this bespoke build to almost exactly the same shot from the overlay in the Adventure park.

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Night and day.

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We’ll end here on an obligatory donkey shot. No hat, but he’s got like a waistcoat thing.

Great park overall, a tad disappointing for me to learn that this one doesn’t really have a unique identity beyond the badge, but you can’t knock the source material, except in Ningbo, and it’s another one off the list.

Didi let us down on the way out, far too obscure a location it seems, so we ended up with some sketchy taxi bloke to take us to Anyang, the other non-descript city that this park lies directly in between. He was alright though, negotiated a fair deal with no fuss.

From there it was another few hours train Journey to the West.

Day 9

China 04/24 – Fantawild Adventure Tai’an
China 04/24 – Silk Road Dreamland

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