Back in March during my son’s Spring Break, we took a trip together from Tokyo to Nagoya to visit Capcom’s “Real Battle Hub” setup in Laguna Ten Bosch. It’s setup in Laguna Ten Bosch, an amusement park near Gamagori in Aichi Ken. Most ways to get there will have you take a Shinkansen to Nagoya (from Tokyo this is about an hour and a half), and another train from Nagoya to Gamagori, which takes about an hour to two hours depending on whether you take an express or some kind or the local train.

You need tickets to Laguna Ten Bosch, which are 2700 JPY to 5000 JPY depending on if you want to just get in the park, or want the ticket that lets you go on the rides that accept it. It looked like you could pay individually for each attraction as well. You also need a ticket to the Real Battle Hub. The main information website is here and in specific tickets section has information about tickets – the price of the tickets changes depending on the day. The ticket includes the price of entry to Laguna Ten Bosch (tickets A, B, C, or E) and ticket type D includes a Passport to all the Laguna Ten Bosch rides and any Special Battle Hub Event that is going on. If you check the calendar in the tickets section, it shows which type of ticket you need each day. On weekends you need more expensive tickets, and on the “D” days there is a special Capcom event. The Real Battle Hub will run only until May 6th, so this is a limited time engagement. Once you decided which tickets you need, you buy them online here. Note that if you stay at the SF6 Collaboration Room in the Henn na Hotel you get a ticket and there is a way to get into the park directly.

Once you get to Gamagori, there is a free shuttle bus from the station to Laguna Ten Bosch. It stops at an Onsen, and also goes to the shopping center, “Festival Market”, that is walkable from Laguna Ten Bosch. Find it at Bus stop #7 out the South exit of the station.

If you are playing along with the Capcom Trip Tokai, a collaboration Capcom set up with JR Rail then keep your eyes open for a SF6 poster in the station, which was a mission at one point.

Capcom Trip Tokai

In fact, let’s talk about that. I did the Capcom Trip Tokai. It isn’t worth it in my opinion, but if you are on the Shinkansen you might as well try depending on how good your Japanese is. There are multiple missions that you can do – mostly about going places and using some webpage or app to verify that you did – and a quiz you can take on the Shinkansen. I found it was pretty hard to figure out what you are supposed to do, or I couldn’t get the missions to accept that I was there when I tried. The Shinkansen Quiz is worth trying, though I found it was very slow to load. You can take the Shinkansen quiz 5 times per day, but only when you are on the Shinkansen. It does a speed / GPS check to make sure you are on the Shinkansen. Maybe you could spoof it with a dangerously fast car or a slow airplane, but that would be pretty tough! The quiz is pretty hard even if you know Japanese, there is some real Capcom trivia in there. As you complete “missions” (like the quiz) you get some points that you can exchange for stuff at the Real Battle Hub, or Capcom Stores I think. I found a place that lists the various things you can get, but I can’t find it now. Mostly small things, nothing I was excited about. I think I got a Chun-Li business card kind of thing, which is nice, but nothing I’d worry about. If you have the time though, it is a nice tie-up, and there are various other things you can do. They list the Capcom Museum in Nagoya (really, a section of Takashimaya in Nagoya station) but that ended already, so they will need to update the site.

Henn na Hotel SF6 Collaboration Rooms

The Henn na Hotel is connected to Laguna Ten Bosch, and has SF6 collaboration rooms.

I reserved a room for my son and myself. We took the shuttle bus from Gamagori, and got off at the Henn na Hotel stop. This chain of hotels is known for using robotic dinosaurs for room check in and other tasks.

I think we ended up calling a real human to check in, but they do have smaller dinosaurs at the desk too. Interesting. Kids may like it. Some adults as well.

The room we had was the Chun-Li and Juri room, which I bet will be the most popular. There are three rooms in total, which vary based on the big cut-out characters in the room.

There was also a PS5 in our room, which is nice I guess. I didn’t boot it up; we wanted to get dinner before heading out. I have some more pictures in my Flickr Album with some of the small characters in the room that you also can’t take with you.

We arrived in the afternoon, and took some time to relax – Alan wanted to watch some YouTube, and I wanted to upload pictures from the train museum (see Father and son trip to Nagoya if you are interested in that). For dinner there is a place to eat in the hotel, but it’s essentially a buffet for breakfast (included with your stay, sign up the night before on the list outside the door of the restaurant) and you know those aren’t any good for dinner. We took a walk to the Festival Market shopping mall, about fifteen minutes, though there is a shuttle bus to get there too. Might as well walk though. There are a couple of restaurants there, and they were fine.

The next morning we headed over to Laguna Ten Bosch. You can get into the park directly from the hotel. There are lockers to place your stuff in after check out, and to open the door into the Amusement Park you need to call the staff (not the dinosaurs, but the real human ones) and ask them to open the door for you. They will check your tickets and buzz you in.

Real Battle Hub

You aren’t supposed to take pictures in the Real Battle Hub, so I only have a few. It’s a nice setup, but essentially you have a bunch of PCs with SF6 on them – about twenty maybe? A stage in the middle with some elevated setups, screens all around, a retro game corner, and a museum section. Pretty nice, but unless you want to play a bunch of Street Fighter, you aren’t going to be spending too much time here. They do have Victrix hardware to lend out – sticks and pads – which is super nice, but likely limited. I’m sure they run out on weekends.

On the way out, don’t forget to grab your bag of goodies. They had an eclectic collection of stuff. Also talk to the nice people at the check-in desk and make sure you complete the “Battle Hub” mission if you are doing the Capcom Tokai Trip thing. On the way out they will give you some stuff. If you take the Shinkansen there tell them when you enter, since you get a different wrist band color that entitles you to a different sticker on the way out. Not sure how they verify that, they just took my word for it.

Don’t forget to check out the collaboration menus at the restaurants around Laguna Ten Bosch. There are a couple of places to eat at the theme park, and they have special SF6 themed sets. The best one is probably the “Ryu Don” at the Blue Lagoon but my son wanted Italian so we went Pinocchio and he got a regular pizza slice while I got the Metro City Pepperoni Pizza.

The collaboration menu at Pinnochio

I wouldn’t say it was good pepperoni pizza, but it was food. Definitely worth it for the memory, but don’t go expecting something that Arlieth would tweet about in a good way.

While we were there Laguna Ten Bosch also had a Frieren collaboration going on. So I got the Frieden magical book hot chocolate.

It’s very similar to normal hot chocolate, but with a Frieren marshmallow.

Before you leave, make sure you find and go to the SF6 shop. I bought way too much stuff here, and my son for some reason thought he had to tell my wife how much I spent! It was too much! Lots of great stuff, and some limited edition things too. Honestly most of the inventory is available in other Capcom stores, but there are some things that are only available here, so for real collectors (not me – I just got some Lily and Zangief stuff and some other random things) it is definitely worth it. I’m sad that the “Capcom Tokai Trip” acrylic stand with the Capcom cast and a Shinkansen broke on the way home – I need to glue that back together.

It was a fun trip, but I really wish I had gone on a weekend when Capcom was doing a talk with the Directors, or some sort of tournament. Check the calendar for the dates marked with “D” because that is the time to go. Otherwise, it’s fun, but we didn’t spend much time at all in the Real Battle Hub really. Most of our time was on the retro cabinets. I think there were like four or five other people on the Tuesday we were there. I didn’t want to challenge anyone though since I thought that would bore my son just waiting for the games to finish. If you go with people to play with you can have a good time, but it isn’t any different from what you would get playing casuals anywhere. Fewer people than if you go to some Tokyo offline event really. The weekend with an event should really be hopping though!

After we finished up our lunch, we headed out of the park to catch the shuttle bus and take the trip back to Nagoya and then Tokyo. On the way out I found Frieren, Fern, and Stark.

You can definitely do a day trip from Tokyo, but that’s a rough schedule. Say 3 hours from Tokyo to Laguna Ten Bosch, so leave at about 7am to get there at 10am, have lunch at the park (you can enter and leave Real Battle Hub freely with the wristband), and leave at about 5pm to get back to Tokyo at about 8pm. I think it is probably better to do an overnight at Nagoya to spread the travel out and explore Nagoya a bit.

Hope this blog post is useful! If nothing else it collects some of my thoughts and I can look back on it in ten years.