Bandai Namco Amusement announced on Wednesday that it will open a new entertainment space named “Mazaria” on the third floor of Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City complex in Tokyo in July.
The new center will use virtual reality (VR) goggles and technology to “mix together the real world and the virtual world,” and will allow guests to “enter the world of anime and games.” Bandai Namco Amusement will announce details on the franchises and attractions that will appear in the space at a later date.
While Bandai Namco Amusement has not announced yet which franchises will be in Mazaria, the Game Watch website notes that the Bandai Namco Group holds the intellectual properties for such franchises as Gundam, Dragon Ball, and Precure.
The entertainment space’s name is a play on the Japanese word “mazariau,” which means “to mix together.”
Mazaria will open in the same location that once housed Bandai Namco Group’s J-World Tokyo, the first theme park dedicated to the characters from Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, from July 2013 to February 2019. (The space was formerly half of Namco Bandai’s NAMJATOWN theme park, which is still operating on Sunshine City’s second floor.)
Bandai Namco Entertainment opened Japan’s largest virtual reality center for a limited time (from July 2017 to March 2019) in the Kabukicho district in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The company then opened another VR Zone in Osaka last September, and that center is still open. In addition, the company has 19 other “VR Zone Portal” satellite locations with VR attractions. It also runs Osaka’s VS Park center for a “variety [of] sports,” Tondemi centers for indoor “next-generation athletics,” indoor Asobi Park Plus playgrounds for children, and Tokyo’s Dokodoko “indoor adventure island.”