Diagon Alley is truly one of the best themed amusement parks in the world.

Some of my favorite memories at Universal are exploring the shops, the alleys, and seeing what sort of effects we can get to occur using our wand.

The area is not perfect though, and there are things that could be improved.

The day we attended was supposedly incredibly light in terms of overall attendance. And yet, the lines to do things such as enjoy ice cream at Florian Fortescue's went out the door and down the street.

In general, most of the stores felt overcrowded. Granted, I understand it's difficult to maintain the authenticity of these stores as they are described in the books, while also making them large enough to accommodate the crowds that they get, but I have to imagine that using better designed walk-throughs, it would prevent the flow of traffic from doubling back on itself.

So often, you find yourself navigating through a fairly narrow area, just to come face to face with someone who has a double wide stroller coming the opposite direction.

For me, the stores, the restaurant, the food carts, and the entertainment are the best aspects of Diagon Alley.

The ride itself, escape from gringotts, is the most lackluster aspect of this land to me. The ride itself relies heavily on screens, something that the entire Universal Studios Park suffers from specifically. You experience these screens from a cart that is a very tame version of an indoor dark Ride roller coaster. You zip along the track for a few seconds until you come to a stop, you watch a seam, at which point you zip along the track for a few seconds to another scene. This repeats until the ride's over. The ending is incredibly anticlimactic. For that matter, the entire storyline feels fairly nonsensical.

All the usual characters show up, they waggle their wands at each other, electricity/magic surges around, and and ultimately, you come out of it completely unaware as to what the point of all of it was. The best I can tell, the impetus of the ride is that you're getting a tour of the bank when one of the Weasley Brothers comes in and mentions he needs to grab something from his office really quickly. This leads to you going to the bank at the same time that Voldemort and Bellatrix invade, and of course they decide that they must attack us, so soon we are supposed to be between a battle between them and Harry and Ron riding on the back of a dragon. What are they looking for? I really have no idea. By placing the story dead in the center of the actual Harry Potter movies, there's really no good reason for it to be happening, and no real resolution at the end. Now I understand that this is just a ride, and it doesn't need to have some overarching storyline. But they did that to themselves by creating this random story. Hagrid's motorbike adventures has shown that you can add a story to a roller coaster, without shoehorning it in to some nonsensical aspect of an existing franchise. They could have very easily just made this a fun ride that takes place in the depths of the bank, dealing with the troll guards and the goblins, without forcing Voldemort and hairy into it.

Luckily, once the ride is over, you can go back to enjoying the fun foods and well-crafted stores that exist in the rest of the land.

Here's hoping the upcoming ministry of magic ride at epic universe, fairs a bit better than escape from gringotts