Stayed here for 2 nights in April 2010 while on a tour with two other friends.

I'll start off with the rooms. Everyone knows that in Japan, the room sizes tend to be on the smaller side. However, the room that we got was huge! How huge? It was big enough to have 3 super single beds in it! The bathroom was on the larger side too. I didn't feel like I was showering in a box. The room and bedsheets all had Wood Woodpecker designs all over and thus maintaining the whole Universal Studios feeling.

We had breakfast in the hotel's restaurant every morning and I'm glad to say that it was delicious and had much variety including Japanese & Western food. Staff were courteous and friendly.

Finally, the location. The hotel was just a 5 minute walk away from Universal Studios Osaka and located right beside the Universal City Walk which had lots of dining and shopping options. I do recommend tourists to check into this hotel the night before you go into the theme park so that you don't need to have an early start the next day and also another night after playing in theme park. This gives you ample time to fully explore the Universal Studios area which is highly recommended.

The hotel is also just another 5 minute walk to the train station. But for tourists who plan to explore the other sights of Osaka, this is definitely not the hotel for you as it is located far off the main train line. For example, we had to take 3 different trains to get from the hotel to Shinsaibashi.

Other than that, great hotel!

The hotel's right by the entrance to the train station, and a couple of hundred yards from the entrance to the Universal theme park. It's new, the rooms are spacious by Japanese standards (by the time you've got to deepest post-industrial Osaka you'll be familiar with Japanese western-style rooms so you'll be impressed here!), the bathroom is well appointed, there's free LAN-cable broadband, and a kettle in the room. The selling point of the hotel (apart from the very reasonable room rate we paid, and the nice environment) is the spa on the one-below-top floor, and it's amazing - you can bathe in a huge hot bath and watch the sun come down over Osaka (the Osaka bit's not very picturesque but the sunset is!). Breakfast was a multicultural buffet, with a predictably Japanese version of a western breakfast section, which was nevertheless fine and acceptable for our Japan-first-timer-mid-western friends. The staff were of course polite (the place was overstaffed compared with the number of guests they seemed to have midweek) and helpful, tho', again as you'd expect, left-of-centre requests such as an early check-in or the location of the nearest international ATM don't go down well. (The int'l ATM, btw, is just inside the park entrance - that was news to the staff!). There are plenty of places to choose from for dinner in the mall just outside.

The hotel isn't really designed for western, or non-Japan-acclimatised, guests, which didn't worry us too much, but if you're a non-Japanese speaking tourist, be prepared for minor misunderstandings and confusions, and smile. Check-in, for example, involved a very long and complicated speech about facilities, discounts, etc., and I doubt would have translated well into English, or been welcomed by your typical western tourist.

All in all this was good value, and high quality. Thoroughly recommended if you're going to the theme park.