The Garden of Eris

Six Flags: St Louis

In the 2022-2023 off season, I was sitting at 99 credits, and thanks to my work travel schedule the first park I was going to visit, and break the exciting 100 coaster mark, was… Six Flags Saint Louis. So maybe not the most exciting park to get number 100 at but It’s still a park my cousins had told me about as a child that I never went to, so at the very least I was finally joining them in on the experience!

I asked Reddit what the best 100th coaster to get here was if I already had ridden Mr. Freeze at SFOT, and the one response I got said American Thunder because it’s far less of a love it or hate it than the other wooden coasters. I took this person’s word, and honestly I do regret it a little bit. My first ride was in the back row, and it was pretty mediocre, having some ok forces but little airtime. A very disappointing number 100. But! I know from youtube that GCI’s are normally considered front row rides, so I looped back around into the front and had a much better experience. Slowly hanging in my seat on the first drop was a lot of fun, and the ride felt like the front seat was where you were meant to experience the forces of going over and around the low hills in the ride. A solid B- coaster, but I can’t complain too much.

Remember how I said I had 99 credits? (It was only two paragraphs ago, so I really, really hope you do for your sake.) As it turns out, I only had 98 marked on coaster count, I think because I was possibly counting a dragon wagon I rode at a fair one time but don’t know how to find on the site, or because I may have ridden Boomerang, previously at SFOT, currently at… hey, Six Flags Saint Louis! Clearly I had intended to ride it during the day and count it as 99 regardless of when I actually rode it! Oh yeah, it was all coming together--it was closed all day. A Vekoma Boomerang out of operation? Who could have predicted that?

Anway, all of this is to say that my true 100th coaster may have actually been what I rode next: Mr Freeze Reverse Blast. A coaster I had already ridden a clone of and didn’t want to be my 100th. As you can see I did an amazing job of planning my day out. Mr. Freeze has a great launch, an incredibly tight and forceful top hat, and the unique sensation of coming to a stop on a vertical spike and beginning to fall down, only to be blasted back upwards by a set of vertical LIMs. While the last one of these was perhaps the best coaster moment at the entire park, I tend not to be a huge fan of raw positives so I found this ride to be just ok. I can easily see why someone else would call it the best ride in the park. However, I do have a major gripe with this ride.

No one who worked at Premier Rides in the 90s had ever sat down in a chair before!!!!!

I am not kidding when I say that when you take restraints out of the picture, the 90s Premier LIM coaster trains are easily the least comfortable coaster trains I have had the misfortune to sit in and I think they’re a big part of why I remember hating rides like Poltergeist and Joker’s Jinx. You get the awful 90 degree angle backs with little leg room and just don’t follow the shape of the human body (or at least my human body) at all. Worse still, if you’re in a wheel seat there’s no room for your outside foot under the shin guard. Both here at SFSTL and last year at King’s Island, my outside foot slipped out and shared the same shin guard as my inside foot. I was unable to slide my foot back in until the restraints came up after the ride. The whole train just feels engineered to give an uncomfortable ride experience.

k, I don’t want to be too hard on anyone. I’ve talked to Industrial Design majors about how chairs are impossible to design and as an engineer I understand that the designers were not only focused on comfort. I have no doubt that making the train feel like it’s operated by United Airlines was necessary in making the car compact enough to launch and go through the coaster elements properly, or at the very least was the first design they found that worked and decided further revisions weren’t worth the tens of thousands of dollars it would cost. I get it, I’m just hoping that modern Premier has learned a few things and has managed to make their rides more comfortable. Hell, the new designs are called Comfort Collars, so how uncomfortable could they possibly be?

Up next was the Boss, and what a doozy! On my first ride, I noticed something uncomfortable on the seat as my butt was slamming around so I reached down and realized that I had placed my phone in my normal pocket instead of my velcro pocket by mistake, and that it had fallen out mid ride and slid under my butt. Thankfully I was able to hold it there, but i was crazy close to having the worst day of my life as I would have found myself in a strange city with no way to find my hotel or any form of contact with anyone I knew (Just like almost happened in France when my phone randomly shit the bed, but that’s another story.)

As for the coaster itself, I discovered that I love the type of coaster that can actually just kill me. You know, when I left the house that morning I was thinking "Damn,” "I really hope some wooden coaster paints my brians all over some fucking forest. And here we are. I mean really, just absolutely destroy me. I'm talkin' full on, watermelon-in-the-thighs level carnage. And I want it to scare the shit outta me. I mean I hope I piss myself. I want it to fuck me up. I mean I want it to make me it’s bitch. Its little peepee-piss-myself-bitch. I want it to get embarrassing. I mean like... weirdly embarrassing Unsanitary, too. I should be an entirely different person by the end of the first eight rides. Do you understand what I'm trying to say here?

Err. I mean, this ride is one of the roughest coasters I’ve ever been on, but I think that enhances it. It’s wild and out of control in a way no other coaster I’ve ever been on is, and I love the variety of the layout. You will feel every force imaginable on this ride, and it will hurt. On my second ride I got stapled, but when you aren’t stapled you’re flying around in your seat and I honestly don’t know which hurt more. It was a good hurt to me, but I left literally bruised and I know that isn’t for everyone, and I get why it has such a divisive reputation. However, in hindsight I wish this was number 100 for me. Not only because it’s my favorite new credit of the year, but also because it’s my first CCI and every year I grow more of an appreciation for wooden coasters.

Rounding out the park’s trio of woodies, I got a single ride in the back row of Screamin’ Eagle, and to contrast The Boss, I found the roughness took away from the ride experience. Instead of feeling like a wild beast, this was far more of a clattering jackhammer and it was just annoying and uncomfortable. Which is a shame, because the layout on this ride is amazing, featuring tons of airtime and one insane hill after the turn around that gave ejector so strong it felt like I was getting punched in the thigh. This is probably my favorite classic wooden coaster, and if it was smoother I think it would have a solid shot at landing in my top 20.

I was starting to get a little nauseous so I decided I didn’t need my 9000th ride on Batman and rode the skyscreamer instead. Love these things, I freeze up and get terrified every time. After that, I rode the two coasters no one cares about. The station for River King Mine Train had genius interior designers, who put the lights above the ceiling fans so they’re constantly strobing as the fans spin in the hot summer heat, making this one of the worst queues of all time. The ride itself pulled some pretty decent forces, but it feels like you only get 5 seconds of ride before hitting the next lift hill, probably because these long trains wouldn't hold enough speed to do anything else. I wake up and thank God every day that I was able to be spoiled by the Whizzer in my childhood.

Last up is Ninja, and I’m not entirely sure how to rate it. Don’t get me wrong though, I did have a miserable ride. Not only was I hitting my nausea limit, I may be a little too tall for this ride (Being so tall at 5’11” truly is a curse.) I pulled the OTSRs down so that they were resting on my shoulders, but since I’m skinny the ride ops pushed them down further, so they were just lodged into my shoulder bones the whole time. However, I didn’t get the headbanging everyone complains about and the layout is probably the best of any old arrow I’ve been on. So even though I didn’t enjoy myself, I am willing to say that I may be wrong about it and would like to try it again next time I go back to this park to ask my Boss for a raise.

So before I give all the coasters my final rundown, I just want to say that this park has off vibes. Cedar Fair uses concrete for all their paths, and while that’s fairly plain and can make the paths boring looking, it’s much preferable to the curving concrete paths Six Flags uses. On top of feeling like I’m wandering through a desolate backroad somewhere, they made the park feel hot and sticky despite the fact that it wasn’t particularly hot or humid out. Another major sticking point for me was how rundown some of the buildings looked. While my nausea was building, I wanted to see a show so that I was doing something mildly entertaining while I was feeling sick. Not that I had high hopes for the Six Flags wild west burlesque show, but I was still disappointed when I showed up to an abandoned looking theater with the play name and show times only to find out that I was on the wrong side of the park because the show was in a completely different building and the staff had trolled me.

I do want to compliment the kiddie section though. I love how it felt like actually being in the forest and secluded by the trees and play structures. It was the only part of the park that felt actually pleasant to spend time in, and I hope they continue to make QOL improvements to make the rest of the park feel like this.

So, that just leaves me with my coaster rankings!

  1. 8. Ninja
  2. 7. Runaway Mine Train
  3. 6. Pandemonium
  4. 5. American Thunder
  5. 4. Mr. Freeze: Reverse Blast
  6. 3. Screamin’ Eagle
  7. 2. Batman (lmao)
  8. 1. Boss

Ok so I lied and rode Pandemonium at some point in there. I think the fact that I wrote the entire trip and forgot about it says you need to know about the ride experience, but I did get a cute photo of a groundhog under the ride!

Overall this is firmly in the category of unremarkable park with one fantastic coaster tier, but they’re on the verge of being a good park. If they smooth out Screamin’ Eagle a little bit then they have two amazing woodies and two very solid clones. With one more standout coaster and improvements to make the park nicer to exist in, this would go up to a full recommendation. As it stands, I still think you’ll have a fun time at the park but I’m not sure I would call this a priority unless you love absolutely brutal wooden coasters and you’re worried Six Flags is going to do something stupid like RMC Boss.