Ghibli park -worth it or not. here's what I think.

With the potentially very impactful caveat that I saw it last year before the entirety was open and was just in grand warehouse and mononoke village....was the thing I most regret doing on entire 2 wk trip 😬 I don't think my experience is anywhere near universally true, as I am not a hard-core Ghibli Fan, saw a lot of other places first, and squeezed a lot of things into my trip (meaning time there is time I didn't go to one of 2 dozen other places I was interested in), but there are some considerations that probably still apply. Its very crowded, and not a place with rides in traditional amusement park sense. A truly insane amount of it is just people standing in long lines to take specific pictures. Its hard to ignore how commercialized it feels if you go to actual peaceful, rural areas of Japan that feel like you've been dropped right in a Ghibli production. I had that feeling just the day before the park in the Iya Valley, so seeing overtouristed fake theme park right after seeing real, charming, sparsely populated villages on mountainsides just felt dejecting. My favorite part of the park was the less crowded exhibit areas that probably more resemble the musuem in Tokyo, I kind of almost liked Aichi Expo park outside Ghibli more, and there are a lot of other places to get Ghibli fix. Places that feel like or inspired Ghibli, the Ghibli Donguri stores in every city, Yufuin Floral Village or Hamamatsu's Nukumori-nomori, and even in downtown Nagoya there's a ghibli themed cafe well before you're anywhere near the park.