HHN trip report:
Disclaimer that this was my first HHN in Japan and so I don’t know what “normal” is for the event here. The only experience I have to compare it to is HHN Hollywood.
It wouldn’t even be accurate to call this “HHN Lite” it’s more like “HHN absolute bare minimum”. The “event” is a couple scarezones and one house starting at 6:00 PM, with the park closing at 9:00 (and even earlier on weekdays I think) so that’s at most only 3 hours worth of HHN stuff.
The scare zones are not what I was expecting. They basically block off a small strip of a street and allow guests to line up on the two sides of the strip. The scare actors then patrol up and down the strip like a corridor. Social distancing is strictly enforced by TMs nearby and I think I even saw some scare actors trying to get people to scooch apart. The actors looked straight up bored, in most cases there just weren’t enough people around for them to interact off of. The only scare zone that was getting a decent crowd was the clown one, but for whatever reason the actors there were hardly interacting with the guests at all, just walking around and interacting with each other. There were a bunch of dance parties earlier in the night including a huge one in front of Spider-Man which people were going absolutely ape over.
The one house looked pretty budget although it had some cool costumes. I’m a huge scardey-cat so the house was enough to get me but I’m sure anyone who’s a fan of American HHN would be disappointed.
The Sherlock theater show however, was great. Legit one of the best shows I’ve ever seen at a theme park. It’s genuinely creepy and tense with a great surprise scare ending. Highly recommended.
Not a lot to say about the rest of USJ, nothing out of the ordinary. SNW is still doing timed entry, it’s worth repeating that SNW really does help fill this park out. I noticed a couple broken things compared to last time I was here right after the grand opening: Yoshi was behind his tree and not moving, one of the clouds at the top of the hill was stationary, the Shy Guy is in B-mode; flapping his arms and turning around but not walking. Also think the Goomba pillar was missing. Cranes are up for Donkey Kong but you can’t really make much out.
Really glad they’re not charging separately for HHN cause that would be total robbery. All the social distancing stuff really killed it, I hope this Corona stuff is over soon.