Lotte World

Seoul, South Korea – Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

I had gotten used to my days wrapping up by 5:00 or 6:00pm, at least those that primarily involved theme parks. As a rule across my Asia travels so far (mostly in Chinese-speaking locations), people visit theme parks during normal daytime working hours, which I presumed was simply following demand. People show up in the morning, spend a few hours in the park to experience a handful of attractions, then are ready to head home or into the city before dinner hour. Even with an official 5:00pm closure, whatever crowds did exist would usually start to disappear at least an hour in advance, suggesting there wasn’t much incentive for the operators to keep things running any longer.

Before I even arrived in Seoul, as I was researching my possible itineraries, I realized that South Korea was culturally different in this regard. Their theme and amusement parks are open much longer hours, often until 8:00, 9:00, even 10:00pm. And, somewhat surprisingly, the demand for them merits the late closures. When I arrived at Lotte World just in time for their discounted 4:00pm evening ticket to begin, there was a lively crowd buzzing around the midways, even if most of the queues were in the 5 to 25 minute range. And, I would find, most of that crowd would stick around until close to the 10:00pm closing hour. Pretty much the opposite of the Chinese parks, where the public area would often feel empty even if the queues were pushing 30-60 minute waits due to slow operations. Pretty close to ideal.

Lotte World is run by the Lotte Corporation, which is mostly known for its confectionaries even as it has grown to become one of the largest business conglomerates in Korea. Apart from candy and a namesake theme park, which would seemingly put Lotte in good company with names like Hershey or Bon-Bon, Lotte also has businesses in hotels, fast food, retail, financial services, industrial chemicals, electronics, IT, and construction. In 2017 it finished the Lotte World Tower just steps from the theme park, becoming the tallest skyscraper in South Korea and fifth tallest in the world. An odd combination of interests, but with such a high profile and diversified mix it seems it would at least give Lotte World the financial backing to grow into a formidable global theme park.

That’s kind of the case; in 2011 it rated as the 17th highest attended theme park worldwide (8th in Asia) in the TEA/AECOM Theme Index, a position that’s been fairly steady through 2019. But on a purely qualitative level, it lags behind somewhat. A little more than half of the park is build indoors, in a cluttered space that quite literally echoes a 1980’s style mall as it frequently alternates between claustrophobia in the side halls and agoraphobia in the main dome. A slightly smaller outdoor section in the middle of an artificial lake is called Magic Island is better proportioned, although the disconnect from the indoor area doesn’t help mitigate the sense that this is a park with an identity crisis. Most of the attractions are based on an adventure or fantasy motif, but they never benefited from a cohesive organizing strategy, with like-minded attraction themes at opposite ends of the park and odd matches located side-by-side. There’s a lot of uncanny copycatting with international theme parks as well, which is most keenly observed in the castle icon at Magic Island and even the park’s logo, which appears to copy the Walt Disney Pictures “striped gradient castle” logo from the 80’s and 90’s.

Still, the park’s twisty layout ensures lots of random hidden discoveries, which can be fun if you go in without any real expectations. Case in point, the first ride I tried was a rather mysterious sign for a Jungle Adventure with a posted 5 minute wait.

This actually turned out to be a round river rapids ride, but done as an entirely indoor dark ride with somewhat cheesy and dusty show scenes that evoke everything from the Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones Adventure, and even Journey to the Center of the Earth. It’s a fairly short ride with the rapids toned down to the indoor setting, but still exciting just by virtue of being on a fairly swift-moving rapids raft through a series of narrow, darkly-lit rooms. A good choice of attraction to set my expectations (whether that be higher or lower) that would help inform the rest of my visit.

Similar thematic motifs ran through the Adventures of Sindbad dark ride, this one imagined with a slower moving Pirates of the Caribbean-style flume.

The Adventures of Sindbad was significantly longer and the animatronics and show scenes were higher quality than the Jungle Adventure. Plus, effort was clearly made to have a storyline running through the whole thing, although what that story was I’m not certain as it was all in Korean. Safe to say it had something to do with the Seven Voyages of Sindbad, although given its obvious influences it also could have become more of a traditional pirate swashbuckler as well.

Apart from Sindbad, the most significant dark ride to check out inside Lotte World’s indoor section is located on the upper floors as Pharaoh’s Fury: The Ride.

The queue is decently decorated as an Egyptian museum that eventually leads into an ancient Egyptian temple, similar in style to Revenge of the Mummy in Florida.

One trend I noticed at Lotte World and other Korean theme parks was an insane amount of graffiti on nearly every reachable surface. I’ve seen nothing like this elsewhere in Asia, or nearly anywhere else in the world. For locals it almost seems like a lo-fi, publicly visible form of social media. A way of preserving and sharing a moment in time that encourages others to do the same, and probably seen as no more socially undesirable than, say, a bunch of people tossing pennies into an open but unreachable area to see where they land.

Pharaoh’s Fury is one of two EMV-style dark ride attractions (based on Disney’s Indiana Jones Adventure/Dinosaur ride system) produced by Intamin with creative design by Battaglia, Inc. The other is located at Leofoo Village Theme Park as Sultan’s Adventure.

Pharaoh’s Fury opened in December 2005 after ten years of construction, which would put its initial conception right around the time of Indiana Jone’s opening. Several scenes echo moments from the Disneyland attraction but for the most part it finds its own identity. In fact, Revenge of the Mummy might feel like the bigger inspiration as the finale scenes heavily mirror that ride’s opening scenes.

I had just ridden Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland for the first time a few months prior, and found myself somewhat let down by what seemed to be a confusing, bombastic experience that was nothing more than a random sequence of all the expected cliches. Pharaoh’s Fury more or less copied the formula, albeit for Egyptology, and to a slightly lesser degree of both scale and finesse.

One thing that separates Pharaoh’s Fury is the inclusion of two “outdoor” sections overlooking the main indoor theme park dome. It’s a nice view and it helps advertise the ride to spectators, something many dark rides in regional parks have a hard time doing, yet it pretty well breaks whatever suspension of disbelief riders might have had.

Since Lotte World opened in 1989, the big attention-grabbing ride in the indoor park has been the French Revolution roller coaster.

This Vekoma looping coaster isn’t particular large or long, and features only a single vertical loop. But it still has some unique features.

The lift hill climbs up the side of this building.

Instead of a large first drop, the first part of the layout features a series of smaller drops and helices throughout some special effects tunnels built in the rockwork underneath the Pharaoh’s Fury attraction.

After doing this for a little while, it finally emerges back above the European street for its largest drop that feeds directly into a vertical loop. With the narrow building facades on either side and an elevated pathway threading the loop, so far the coaster has made surprisingly effective and original use of the indoor setting. One of the advantages of being an opening day attraction integrated with the original master plan.

A short, jarring S-bend leads to a block brake. From there it dives down into an inclined double helix, featuring some relatively advanced, although far from flawless, track shaping considering the late-80’s vintage. It reaches the final brakes shortly after.

The biggest issue, as could be predicted, is the roughness exacerbated by the encumbering shoulder harnesses. Coupled with a somewhat long wait, I’d only take the French Revolution for a single loop this evening.

A massive ice rink sits at the bottom of the middle of the dome.

Meanwhile, the route to the outdoor Magic Island portion of the park is quite hidden. One route requires going behind the restrooms. It seems likely the original indoor park was never designed with access to a future outdoor section as a consideration.

Magic Island. Look familiar?

What’s interesting about Magic Island is that the theme doesn’t really change that much compared to the indoor Adventure section, continuing the somewhat random mix of Europeanized fantasy and mythological adventure themes, all dusted with amusement rides and Korean advertisements.

The real difference is that much larger outdoor attractions are placed here, including two separate tower attractions.

The bigger of the two is a 315 foot tall Intamin Gyro Drop, named Gyro Drop.

There’s a second, smaller shot tower style ride called Bungee Drop. I’m not certain of the manufacturer.

Also keeping with an Intamin Gyro theme, is an Intamin Gyro Swing.

A few other attractions, including a Vekoma Waikiki Wave, which I believe has since been retired.

The Swing Tree.

Stick the smallest ride you can imagine by the corner of your castle if you have the free space!

And the Ghost House, a walkthrough haunted house that appeared popular and maybe involved a 3D element of some kind? I honestly cannot recall if this was something I personally tried or not. All of the generic Asian spook houses I’ve experienced have blended together in my memories.

Two of Lotte World’s three coasters are located in Magic Island. The first of these is Comet Express, an enclosed Intamin Twist-and-Turn coaster that opened with Magic Island in 1995.

It’s the same ride system as what I encountered for the Sahara Twist at Leofoo Village Theme Park in Taiwan, which even reused the lead car found on Comet Express.

While Sahara Twist was a gently forgettable novelty, Comet Express shows the potential of this unique spinning tire-propelled coaster style with a decently long indoor layout full of special effects and some surprisingly fast turns and aggressive spinning. The video I captured shows a few effects, but even if it wasn’t so dark there wouldn’t be much to see with all the spinning anyway.

The star attraction at Lotte World is 2003’s Atlantis Adventure, the first and still only Intamin Aqua Trax coaster ever built, which has since inspired countless rumors and memes among speculating coaster fans.

The Aqua Trax is a strange platypus of a coaster. The LSM-launched track design behaves a lot like an early prototype for their Blitz coasters, yet it features these rather ridiculous 4-row boat-like vehicles with low-slung saddle-like seats, and several faked water features, such as the blue troughs along some of the drops that occasionally (but not today) spray some light water mist for show, as if they were real water flume drops. The effect is far from convincing even when it works.

It seems like Intamin wanted to cash in on a more thrilling version of the “water coaster” craze that was kicking off in the late 90’s and early aughts, but ultimately concluded that it was better to just design it like a roller coaster and add water elements around it that don’t directly interact. That means the Aqua aspect of Atlantis Adventure pretty much fails, but the Trax aspect is quite good. That’s a trade-off I’ll personally take any day.

Atlantis Adventure kicks off with a launch into a near-vertical twisting maneuver (although the curvature is different from a traditional top hat maneuver) that nearly scrapes the walls and ceiling in a hidden Atlantean dome room. Between the intensity, the enclosed setting, and the low, minimalist seating, this initial maneuver is more unique than many of the larger rocket coasters that Intamin has produced.

Instead of dropping back down, the coaster instead starts a wild series of fast banked curves weaving in and out of the structure. The sense of speed with the structure so close is incredible, and this is easily the best part of the ride sequence.

It soon drops down to ground level for a high-speed curve just inches above the water. There appeared to be pumps and nozzles for a water spray effect but I never saw these in use.

From there it brakes and goes into an enclosed dark ride segment. After such a vigorous ride, this moment feels quite hollow and static by comparison. The psychedelic creature design of an Atlantean animatronic should spark interest, but it’s so slow moving with hardly any theatrical flourishes to bring it to life that we’re just left waiting for the next set of LSMs to kick in. When they do, instead of a high-speed launch into a crazy vertical spiral, we’re greeted with a fairly standard uphill incline. A turnaround at the top leads to a straightforward drop, then back up into the main mountain structure for one more go-around.

This final segment feels half the speed and half the duration of that first section after the initial launch. It soon emerges for a would-be dramatic drop finale back down to water level, where it abruptly encounters a set of brakes. I suspect the original intent was to have this drop be accompanied with an epic splashdown effect, such as the Jurassic Park River Adventure finale, but with it designed as a dry coaster and the engineering and maintenance costs of pumping that much water for an artificial effect every 30 seconds or so, it was probably one of the first show elements cut for budget. Or maybe it was always intended to be one big anticlimax.

The problem with Atlantis Adventure is it has all the right parts in all the wrong order. If they could have just flipped the sequence in reverse—start with the gentler traditional coaster section, drop down with a hard stop into a surprising dark cavern, meet the monster then launch out into a much wilder second half with a water-skimming finale—each moment would have been able to build on the previous in a clear crescendo and resolution. Instead, Atlantis Adventure shocks the system with far too much far too suddenly, which leaves the second half as not much more than an extended breath-catching opportunity. The component parts are still very good (it’s the only ride I’d experience more than two times in my six hours at Lotte World) but they somehow add up to less than their sum total.

The sun was beginning to set and I still had more to explore.

Back inside the main dome, I had to try a strange balloon ride called Aeronauts.

Climb inside a plastic hot air balloon, which is then hoisted by cables up to a track embedded in the ceiling, for a slow suspended tour around the dome with some fantastic views of the park.

I also rode a Jurassic themed indoor Flume Ride. A decent enough flume with two drops and some show scenes. The station and and dark ride section were themed to Morocco, while, the rest of the “outdoor” portion was themed to dinosaurs. And this wasn’t even the first time I experienced a log flume with an odd cultural/paleontological mashup theme while in Asia.

As the closing hour ticked down, I finished the night by heading back to Magic Island for as many rides as I could on Atlantis Adventure as the lines disappeared.

I wasn’t the only one with this idea, as another group of Korean guys was doing the same and we often ended up on the same vehicle together. Once the ride finally closed for the night they insisted on getting a photo together. A nice memento from the end of an extremely productive if somewhat exhausting day at three of Seoul’s amusement and theme parks.

Next: Demilitarized Zone

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