Planning a trip to Japan can be overwhelming as you only have a certain amount of time and money to spend in the country. Having an idea of what might interest your group more can help to guide you towards activities that your party will enjoy most. There are certainly some places that are almost mandatory for a first-time traveler to Japan, such as the Peace Parks in Nagasaki and Hiroshima or the Thousand Torii gates, but there are other more niche stops that you and your traveling group might particular enjoy. For example, we love beer, Japanese food and video games, so we wanted to make sure that visited as many breweries as possible, tried as many unique and highly rated Japanese dishes and restaurants as we could, and we went to many arcades. The other must do for my husband and I was a visit to the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto.
My husband has been what some might call a fanboy of Nintendo for as long as he could hold a controller in his hands. He, and now we, has owned nearly all of the gaming systems put out by Nintendo, has played if not owned most of the games released by Nintendo, and has highly enjoyed much of the IP (movies, music, memorabilia) that the company puts out. Planning a visit to the Nintendo museum during our trip to Japan was a must. It also turned out to be one of the things that we were most excited about doing.
The process of getting tickets to the museum, however, was a lot more complicated than we expected:
1)Create your free Nintendo account (if you don’t already have one). Everyone in your party needs their own account.
2)Enter the lottery about 3 months out. The drawing for November tickets are currently available in August. You will need to choose your preferred date and times at the time of entering the lottery (which can be kind of tricky if you aren’t sure of your plans yet). You will need the names of everyone who will be going with you and you need a passport to prove your identity when you arrive at the museum.
3)The first day of the following month you will find out if you were selected and what time slot you are given. If you didn’t win, you can stay on a wait list to see if tickets become available. If you did win, they you need to go ahead and pay for your tickets, which cost 3,300 Japanese Yen or roughly $20 USD.
4)The day before your assigned ticket time you will receive a QR code, which you must provide along with your ID (passport for those traveling from outside of Japan).
Our appointment was at noon, which gave us enough time to not only go see the Torii Gates in the morning, but also we were able to walk over to the Tea Square Morihan Kura Cafe, which is a 10 minute walk from the Nintendo Museum, for some delicious matcha. And, I highly recommend both of those experiences and consider them icing on the cake to a great day filled with Mario and his friends.
Upon arrival to the Nintendo Museum, we were immediately ushered into a fun themed locker area where we could store our bags (making sure to carry our passports with us), which were not allowed inside. We waited our turn to go in and then we were in another area where we could get our photos taken coming out of warp pipe and punching the questions mark block. Everything around us was Nintendo themed from the Kirby vending machine to the Pokemon sewer cover to the Gameboy Umbrella lockers. It was really, really cool. That is also the area where you can access the cafe and get fun Nintendo themed foods. We decided to try it after our time in the museum.
Once we entered the museum, we encountered another fun photo op and we were able to shop in the big and very dangerous (because of how easy it is to drop hundreds of USD) gift shop. Anything you could wish for that was Nintendo themed you could spend your money on. Every video game system had a dedicated area where you could get a t-shirt, magnet, keychains, decks of cards and more. They had these giant pillows that were shaped like video game controllers that would have been so fun to bring home. We ended up spending quite a bit there.
After another short wait, we finally got to go into the actual museum exhibit and interactive play area. They encouraged us to go into the play area first as it gets busier later on in the day. In this area, everyone is given 10 digital coins that could be used on a variety of interactive games. The catch is that once you run out, you run out, and can’t purchase extras, so you have to choose wisely. The most popular interactive games were the games with the giant controllers and the shooting side scroller. You could also play pretty much any classic Nintendo game your heart desires along with a couple of fun games that you would never have a chance to play at home. We played the giant controller versions of Super Mario 64 and SNES Mariokart. Chris used his tokens on the shooting game while I played my old school favorites, Dr. Mario and Picross. Then, we played an interactive card game on the floor where you have to look through a tablet to find a matching card on a giant screened floor filled with hundreds of cards. This was fun and I won. Finally, Chris dominated at a game called Ultra Hand where he used a grabber to collect the most Pokeballs.
Above the interactive area was the actual museum where photos were prohibited. If you wanted to, you could spend hours looking at everything. The museum showed the complete history of Nintendo displaying how it started with the hand painted cards, expanded to board games and then to video games. Every single system that exists was on display as well as every game and accessory that you could purchase to go with it. It was really fun seeing all of it and saying “Got it. Got it. Got it. Want it Got it.” We also purchased a $20 book that essentially showed off everything found in the museum. Once we felt like we had seen everything, we exited the museum.
Before leaving, we went to the Nintendo Cafe where we built our own burgers using this adorable animation. Everything inside the cafe was Nintendo themed and really fun. I got some great pictures of a beautiful Zelda themed window, the Animal Crossing posters, and an Animal Crossing floating present. The food was also very good and made for a meal well spent. We took a few more photos out in the courtyard before heading out into the less fun, real world.
Is the Nintendo Museum for everyone who visits Japan? Because I live in a world that is so immersed in video games with Nintendo being the star, I would say yes. But, I am sure that there are some people visiting Japan would rather go to Tokyo Disneyland. If we were to go back, we would likely visit Japan’s Disney parks, and I would also put in a vote to see the Studio Ghibli, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we snuck in another visit to the Nintendo Museum as well.
For us, the Nintendo Museum was definitely worth visiting and was one of the highlights of our entire trip to Japan. If you are a Nintendo Fanboy like us, I would love to help you warp on over to the Nintendo Museum. Contact me today and I can get you ready to see all that Japan has to offer.