Epic Universe is the world’s newest theme park, and by any metric, it’s an absolutely incredible creation. It has five amazing lands, and it includes some of the most impressive new attractions of any kind anywhere in the world. It offers some incredible food and has a state-of-the-art hotel, the Universal Helios Grand, attached directly to the park. There’s really nothing to dislike about Epic Universe… unless you have a problem with stairs.
While I hadn’t necessarily noticed this before, it was pointed out by YouTuber Offhand Disney that this particular park has a lot of stairs. He made his first trip to Epic Universe recently and made the point that, wow, Epic really does love stairs. Now the YouTuber’s pointed it out, I really can’t unsee it.
My main takeaway from my first ever visit to Universal (Epic Universe) yesterday: These people LOVE THEIR STAIRS. If there’s a STAIRCASE they can have you climb, they WILL have you climb that STAIRCASE
Some of the Epic Universe stairs are impossible not to notice. As you enter the portal to Super Nintendo World, you are greeted by a massive staircase that takes you up., and as you exit into the main land area itself, you will find an equally massive staircase that will take you back down. To be fair, by doing it that way, you have an incredible view of Super Nintendo World when you come out of the portal, but stairs can be an issue for those with disabilities or even strollers.
While this is the only major staircase in a land, there are some significant staircases within many of Epic Universe’s best rides, including Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry, Stardust Racers, and Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment. There are also a lot of stairs in the Mario Kart attraction inside Super Nintendo World. Epic has worked around these for parkgoers that need it, but it is a lot of stairs.
There are, of course, plenty of other theme parks that have stairs in a land or in an attraction, but generally speaking, eliminating stairs tends to make accessibility easier for everybody, and so theme parks tend to avoid them when they can.
As Offhand Disney himself says in a reply, this is not so much a complaint as it is an observation, but it is an interesting one. The stairs were certainly deemed necessary, likely for attractions to hit certain footprints so that everything Epic Universe needed to have would be able to fit inside its walls. However, it is interesting that so many attractions ended up needing stairs.
To be fair, even with all the attractions and land that need stairs, I’m not sure Epic Universe has more total stairs than the Starway at Universal Studios Hollywood. The path that connects the park’s upper and lower lots has nearly 350 steps to move you between the two halves of the park. It’s so big that the upcoming Fast & Furious roller coaster will go around the Starway. It’s a major time investment just to move between them, even if Robert Redford could jog the Starway without breaking a sweat.