TacoCat’s Travels #278 (Tokyo): Scavenger Hunt in Joypolis!

Hey Hive!

Sorry for the hiatus last week but I was busy with work and honestly didn't have the energy to do anything else.. But now we're back to our regular schedule, continuing on with our anniversary trip to Tokyo back in Feb 2023! It'd been at least 3 years since we visited Tokyo and the last time was pre-covid so we decided to go back and find some new places to explore while revisiting our favourite hot-spots.

Last time, we left off starting a new day in Toyosu where we got to walk over the train tracks which is pretty unique.

We visited a special convenience store for our favourite breakfast, this Bacon and Egg Toast from Daily Yamazaki's Daily Bakery!

The thing is this convenience store chain typically does not have a bakery but this particular outlet does and they had quite the selection. It's one of our favourite snacks and is a must-eat every time we visit Japan!

After that we took a walk to the nearby park which also looks out into the river! It was very sunny but the sky was a beautiful cloudless blue and we even managed to find a few cherry blossom flowers!

We took some shots near the water and managed to catch a few adorable doggos going on a walk.

But it was getting pretty warm so we decided to take the train a few stops down to Odaiba!

6 Feb 2023. Monday.

We didn't really have plans on what to do here so we just explored the mall beside Odaiba station.

It seemed pretty empty on a late Monday morning but I guess it's more popular on weekends since it's a little ways outside of main Tokyo.

I can see a lot of tourists coming here though since there is LegoLand, Madame Tussauds and Joypolis here which is an indoor amusement park.

We decided to check out the mall itself first and it seemed pretty regular. There were some outlet shops though.

There was also a pretty big open area with lots of capsule machines.

There were some interesting machines like this 3d geometric animal figurine:

This one with animal butt magnets which I think we did actually get. We got a penguin butt.

There was also this one with different dog houses.

And this one with animals in an orchestra that looked quite cute.

They also had this contraption for you to recycle your empty capsules. We thought it was going to be a game but it was actually just a fancy bin I guess.

We did see a few other tourists walking by but not too many. We figured most of them were probably in the theme parks.

We browsed the shops for a while then went to go check out the theme parks just to see what it was like since we've never been.

We've heard of Joypolis a lot and have been to Odaiba before but never actually been inside so I wasn't sure what kind of rides they had. Even though it's owned by SEGA they had a lot of anime-related things that I didn't recognise.

I think they also had a collab with some vtubers from hololive at the time but I'm not familiar with them.

These were the ticket prices for Joypolis and we were actually a little confused since it looked like we had to pay for the attractions we wanted to ride but if you get the passport you can ride whatever you want. I guess it's good to have the option if you didn't have a lot of time.

This is a list of all the attractions and they had a chart for who could take the ride, depending on age and health conditions.

It was around mid-afternoon by the time we went and they closed at 5pm so we were debating whether to go in or not. But we figured if we buy the normal ticket and just choose a few rides it would be okay.

I actually don't remember if that was what we did but soon we had our tickets and we were through!

And of course the first thing we see when we entered was Sonic in the merchandise store.

They had quite a lot of Sonic goods since Joypolis is run by SEGA.

They also had my favourite sticker brand: B-Side Label but it looked like they just had the regular stuff and not anything special to Joypolis.

When we entered there were lots of lights around and we expected to see a lot more people but there weren't that many.

We only had a few hours so we made a beeline for the rides that had the shortest queue and the first one we came across was this one called Live Coaster. They were blaring out Reach for the Stars from Sonic Colours which is actually one of my favourite Sonic songs so I was excited.

But we realised the queue was pretty long so we decided to wait on it and take a look around first.

There was a main stage area with lots of rotating spotlights and I think it's where the vtubers would perform for the hololive collab. I assumed the happy birthday banner was for one of them.

There was a huge banner on the ground floor as well and a separate merchandise booth just for hololive.

Just around the corner from that was this crazy ride that looked like they were going to slide on a half-pipe but maybe while spinning? It looked way too crazy for us though.

This Joypolis theme park was not only fully indoors but also seemed to be quite high-tech, since all the rides incorporated some other digital element like interactive displays or VR.

There was this attraction that had the shortest waiting time but we didn't really understand what it was until we got to the front of the line.

The staff explained that it was kind of like a scavenger hunt and we had these devices that we could use to scan the area for hidden symbols. Initially we thought we were going to go in some other room to do it.

It seemed a little complicated to be honest but I guess we were supposed to look for certain emblems around the theme park and scan them to get some treasure.

They had some warnings of course, and with the sheer number of instructions I can see why this had the shortest queue.

We decided to try it anyway and so were given the Analyser devices by the staff.

Unfortunately though the actual display on the Analyser is all in Japanese so we could only understand a fraction of what was on it. But we had 30 minutes to go and find all the emblems we needed.

Once we were handed the devices we were sent off on our expedition! The devices were actually kind of bulky and I think people who didn't know what we were doing were judging us.

But the good thing about this is it allowed us to have a walk around the theme park I guess.

We found the emblems pasted in quite prominent locations like on this pillar by the arcade.

Thankfully there were some English words but they weren't super helpful. We had to find 5 emblems so we thought it was going to be tough to find them in the whole park.

The emblem looked something like this:

But thankfully it wasn't too bad, though some were harder to spot than others.

Once we found an emblem we had to use the device and scan it like this until something popped up on the screen.

There were also some puzzles or hints associated with each emblem that either linked to the next one or was part of the overarching expedition, I'm not too sure.

I got a little distracted looking at all the other attractions in the park though.

We did have to consult the map to find the last few emblems to see if the screen was giving us a hint.

The park is quite huge to hide these small emblems that could be on any surface.

There were some tricky puzzles on it that we just couldn't figure out.

But we did try our best to find as many as we could.

I think there were specific ones we were supposed to find related to the clues though.

And the thing is, if you didn't get the correct corresponding emblem your total time would be cut by 5 minutes.

Eventually we just ran out of time due to all the incorrect attempts. But by then we had basically given up. Not being able to understand what was written also made it difficult to solve the puzzles.