Nintendo London Pop-Up Store is open now and here’s what’s exclusive to it

The first ever Nintendo Store in Europe has opened in London, filled with exclusive merch that isn’t quite as expensive as you’d think.

One of the keys to Nintendo’s long-running success is the sheer number of iconic franchises it has under its roof, most of them very separate from each other – except when it comes to a round of Super Smash Bros.

And yet, up until very recently, many of the games had little or no merchandise to call their own. There’s been a Nintendo Store in New York for years, that has a lot of unique items, but surprisingly not even Japan had one until quite recently.

There’s certainly never been a store in Europe… until now. As of today, there’s a pop-up store in Shepard’s Bush, London that will be open for four weeks and features a variety of items from the Tokyo and Osaka stores, plus two exclusive items just for London.

Before you get too excited the exclusive merch is a canvas tote bag and… a smaller, fold-up plastic tote bag. They’re quite cheap, at £9.99 and £3.99, respectively, but that’s it in terms of exclusives.

For some reason, the store prominently displays T-shirts from the Tokyo and Osaka stores, but nobody thought to print any that say London, which seems a bit of a low effort.

Despite that mild disappointment, we had a preview trip the day before it opened and thoroughly enjoyed looking through it all (and no, we didn’t get anything free).

It’s a very small shop but the first thing that struck us was the amazing soundtrack playing the whole time, which includes a cornucopia of classic Nintendo tunes from many different sources. It was so good we’re shocked it wasn’t available as a soundtrack you could buy but, like we said, Nintendo is still new to the whole shop merch concept.

The store is organised by franchises, with separate sections for Super Mario, The Legend Of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and Splatoon. Sadly, more obscure series were not represented (we’ve still never got so much as an amiibo for Advance Wars) but there are still some deep cuts in terms of characters and the merch itself.

If you’ve ever wanted a Tingle plushie or a Pikmin hoodie, your dreams have been answered. Although we also liked the rupee bag from Zelda, the Super Mario warp pipe pen holder, and the Splatoon coasters.

There’s a bewildering amount of plushies for Kirby, many based on The Forgotten Land, and yet some strange omissions. There was nothing Boo related (one of our favourite Mario characters) and all the Donkey Kong items were based on his older Rare design.

We were lucky enough to visit the Tokyo store last summer and that definitely had a lot more products, especially in terms of apparel and houseware, but if this convinces Nintendo to open a permanent store, with more stock, then we’re sure fans won’t complain.

The most impressive thing about the London store, though, is that the prices weren’t nearly as inflated as we expected. We spent £106.84 in total, for which we got the two tote bags, a larger Super Mario bag, a really neat Korok plushie from Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, a Bullet Bill plushie, and a kid’s T-shirt.

We’re not going to pretend any of it was cheap, but we expected to be taken to the cleaners a lot more than that, especially as we were specifically browsing for Christmas presents.

Oh, and you get a free Switch magazine (which smells really nice) and some Platinum Points whenever you buy something – and some neat carboard shopping bags to put everything in.

Where is the Nintendo London Pop-Up store?

The Nintendo London store is in the Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. Because it’s a pop-up store It’s not on the interactive maps but if you search for the Lego store it’s directly opposite that on the first floor.

We used the Shepherd’s Bush tube station, on the Central line, to get there but the Westfield Shopping Centre is accessible from a number of different stops, as well as via bus, car, and other conveyances.

Do you need a ticket for the Nintendo London Pop-Up store?

The problems with getting into the store are two-fold. Although it’s open from October 22 until November 16, during the first week (October 22 to October 26) you can only get in if you have a ticket. These were given out several weeks ago, so there’s basically no chance of getting in now until October 27.

The second problem is that, if the previous Pokémon Pop-Up stores are anything to go by, the queues for the final three weeks are going to be horrendous. There’s no way round the problem either and no real way of guessing when the best time to visit might be.

Although we’d avoid going too late, as the Pokémon stores stopped people queuing after a certain time. Also, they tended to run out of stock a lot towards the end of the day.

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