Continued...
Ministry, while fresh, shiny, and new will age the worst in my opinion. To many, the queue is better than the ride. That's...
not a good thing to be known for. The queue gets tons of points for the floo and Ministry opening but after that we're just kinda shuffled into nondescript hallways. Even in the cleaner room and the offices there isn't much of note. The Minister's hallways/room is cool, as is the Auror room, but Higgledy's room is far too small and should have been an actual stopping point for a pre-show like Gringotts where she gives you beats of the story. Story-wise, this ride is a
literal mess. Why am i there?
I wouldn't be allowed there. Not every Average Joe can walk into the Supreme Court, okay. School is one thing, a banks is another, but a District Office of authority?
I don't think so; My immersion is fracturing. Narratively, Umbridge was never a confirmed Death Eater in the books and it serves to reason that even if she agreed with their stances on purity they wouldn't literally work together
(and I don't think they'd want HER either). Break it down to this: She might be racist, but that doesn't make her a member of the KKK or She might be a corrupt elitist, but that doesn't maker her a Nazi. She's deplorable, it's her arc and her trope to use her power for evil, but allying herself with Death Eaters -while not a stretch for many to assume- is something the books made a point to draw lines about.
"Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters,” (Sirius Black). On this ride... they are. Which is both thematically shallow and boring. Having Umbridge say dumb things like "We'll go back to the time of Lord Voldemort" while she's stealing a time-turner is both cringey AND ineffectual for her character.
Voldemort on Gringotts she is not; So the story stalls and flounders at its literal entry-point for even being there. On time-turners,
just don't. We learned this with Cursed Child:
It was bad then and it's bad now.
Now... the ride. It's just
not great, guys. It's an elevator that looks nothing like the elevators you see in the series or
on the literal ride multiple times and worst of all; It doesn't even function like a regular MUGGLE elevator! I've talked about this before but
it doesn't go up or down nearly at all. It's not thrilling and it's borderline not fun. You mention being taken from screen to screen for Gringotts, what are you seeing about Ministry that i'm not? We literally pan left to right in
every room, jostle in front of a screen or -in some cases- the same elevator with
awful not-the-actual-actor impressions that have
always been bad. At least Gringotts ends with a thrilling coaster portion and makes it about actors
they can actually get: the ride
rides. Someone seriously thought we'd want the show-scene from Tower of Terror for an entire ride and -well- they're wrong. Tower of Terror is nothing without the drop and that goes extra for Ministry at failing the basic functionality of an elevator. Yes, the 2 Death Eater animatronics are REALLY good in Ministry. Here's the problem with that... it makes the rest of the ride look WORSE in comparison because there's nothing else outside the Erumpent; Which, story-wise, has no reason to be there! There is a Spirit Division of the Ministry, which is why ghosts are there and make narrative sense, but why in Gods name are literal animals in an office building? The Fantastic Beasts series goes through 3 good-to-bad movies trying to tell us that the Ministry looks down on the work Scamander is doing... so, then,
why are all of these creatures in the literal British Ministry of Magic? Oh, because of the land. In this park.
My immersion is shattered. Diagon and Gringotts makes sense! 1920's France to 1990's British Minstry....
Doesn't! Don't worry
the general audience doesn't care!
The ride is about time-turners so let's use that as an excuse for the land! I'm saying it here:
People have noticed this and talk about it; Some choose to ignore it but that stands to reason that
it's something WORTH ignoring.
As far as rides go, it's a 7/10 looking at things optimistically and giving bonus points for the queue. The screens are good and i don't actually hate the face animatronics as much as other people do,
but that doesn't mean they're good. It's frustrating to love HP this much and have so many conflicting feelings on this ride but it absolutely the weakest of the four and i came to that conclusion after my first ride. 4 more rides on it and the system is still not up to snuff to be hailed as a headline attraction at this park, either. It's unreliability is a factor. Several of the screens glitched out on my last ride, as well, and that's left a bad last impression. Call it growing pains or call it what you will, it needs to move people better than 2-4 hour waits and that's a huge knock against it that only Hagrids is in comparison on. The problem with that?
Hagrids is worth a 3 hour wait. This is not.