On December 31st 2017 Space World, located just east of Kitakyushu on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, closed forever. Themed to a sci-fi cartoony space theme, the park had several coasters such as the Intamin launch coaster called Zaturn, the Arrow hypercoaster Titan MAX, and the intense Venus GP.
When the park closed some of the attractions did not make it such as Titan Max and Black Hole Scramble, but the park’s ferris wheel and Venus GP were much more luckier. Not long after the coaster was dismatled, it showed up in Hokkaido in a field nearby Resutsu Highland, a ski resort/amusement park in Saporro’s outskirts. The coaster sat in pieces for at least a year and ultimately it vanished again.
Not long later, Venus GP showed up again and this time at Himeji Central Park, an animal and amusement park located north of the city of Himeji. The coaster received a new coat of paint and extensive refurbishment and finally opened for riders in July 2022.
Venus GP was originally built in 1996 by Maurer Rides and was designed by Anton Schwarzkopf, a legend in the coaster community. Riders experience a total of 5.2 g-forces making it an incredibly intense coaster.
When I traveled on my southern Japan trip back in February of this year, this coaster was one of the top priorities I wanted to ride. I felt regretful of not being able to visit the original Space World before it closed and was happy to hear it reopen at Himeji Central Park.
The coaster feels like it is the park’s star attraction, but it does also have a B&M inverted coaster with the same layout as Batman: The Ride so it does share the spotlight a little. Venus GP really did live up to my expectations and managed to take four laps on it. It is a very intense coaster that focuses more on the tight turns and transitions than the airtime. Be advised that anything you bring with you into the station oddly must ride with you during the ride and glasses must be removed. Another odd fact is that it uses four different restraint methods:
-A seatbelt across your lap.
-A lapbar.
-An accordian-style sholder restraint.
-Another seatbelt that connects the top of the lapbar to below your seat.
If you are on the larger side you may have trouble with the seatbelts, especailly the last one.
If you make it to Himeji, west of Osaka, I definitely reccomend making the trip out to the park to ride it. There is a bus that goes to the park right from the shinkansen station (exit the north part of the station to the bus area and use Bus #14. It also stops at Himeji Castle).