When the original Forza Horizon came out in 2012, it took everyone by surprise. Forza was a series of simcade racing games developed by Turn 10 Studios and was heavily promoted by Microsoft as Gran Turismo’s rival and as a valid reason for genre fans to purchase the Xbox.
But then, in early 2012, it was announced that this unknown studio called Playground Games was going to make a spinoff, Forza Horizon.
On paper, it shouldn’t have succeeded. That year had an NFS Most Wanted brewing by the acclaimed devs at Criterion, coming only a week after Horizon. It was a massive brand reusing a massive name for publicity. It’s highly likely that it outsold Forza as well. But Horizon won the war.
Incredible critical reception for the game was echoed by the players as well, for the game featured a never-before-seen open world scope that went beyond the offerings of Test Drive 2 and such.
The game had tons upon tons of content, engaging progression, a genuinely interesting story, and a driving model that had people come back to the game for a long time.
It’s been almost fifteen years since then, and Forza Horizon is a different series now. A world-renowned name, a system-seller, a powerhouse that dominates charts even on the rival PlayStation 5.
But the last couple of entries also had some design decisions that had the fans wondering, “Is this how the series is going to be now moving forward?”
Fortunately, despite a huge wave of new players, thanks to Game Pass availability and multi-platform releases, Playground Games listened and tried to give us the best of both worlds. And we’d say they succeeded. Mostly.
Setting as the main draw
This was a long time coming: Forza Horizon 6 is set in Japan. Like I already mentioned in my pre-release article, where I listed all the reasons to be excited for Forza Horizon 6, this was immediately and unapologetically the game’s main draw.
In a way, I’m thankful that they waited for this long to set the game in Japan. The game looks absolutely mind-boggling. On my fairly modern system with an RTX 3090, Ryzen 7 9700X, and 32GB of RAM, at 1440p, it produced around 50 FPS on all the extreme settings with ray-tracing enabled. DLSS Quality gave me a stable 60 with no dips, bugs, or visual glitches whatsoever.
Forza has always been a great-looking series, as much as some fans like to argue about some inaccurate car proportions, with Horizon especially shining in this regard, as we can see way more than just the race track landscapes.
The first game was going for an obvious Coachella vibe, and while not especially groundbreaking, being released late in the Xbox 360 life cycle, still looked good. Horizon 2 upped the game immensely, and the Northern Italy/Southern France setting with incredibly picturesque landscapes helped a lot. The third game went back to being dusty, but Playground Games managed to inject a lot of life and color into the Australian outback.
It’s the fourth installment that really made people go “Woah.” Scotland, the game’s setting, is pretty by itself, but by adding the changing seasons, it managed to showcase the beauty from every angle imaginable. Forza Horizon 5, set in Mexico, gave us one of the most colorful renditions of the country in any piece of entertainment media, with high fidelity textures and phenomenal weather effects.
Forza Horizon 6’s Japan encapsulates all of these advancements, adds well-implemented ray tracing, and multiplies it by the inherent Japanese charm. Every moment spent in this game was picturesque. Winding mountain roads, covered by the canopies of trees, open up into breathtaking views of Mount Fuji, so beautiful that Hokusai himself would add them to his collection. Neat temples (which you thankfully can’t desecrate by crashing into, as I accidentally found out by going too fast in my Koenigsegg Jesko), small dango shops and konbinis, typical Japanese gas stations, all of this is recreated in great detail, care, and respect. Tokyo looks good, too, especially at night, as every big city does.
Curiously, there are way more people everywhere, brilliantly tucked behind indestructible objects, so even beyond the bounds of the Festival grounds, this does not feel like a world made only for cars.
When Playground Games said that they wanted to capture the essence of all of Japan in this game, they weren’t kidding. Of course, you can’t really properly fit an entire country into an open-world racing game, though some have tried. What Playground’s team did was create a fictionalized version of the Tokyo area, which has both the big city, tranquil plains, Gunma prefecture mountains, and Hokkaido’s snowy landscapes within about a fifteen-minute ride from each other. The way we’re exposed to Japanese media all the time, every bit of it is recognizable, despite being almost completely fictional.
I say almost, because the devs went out of their way to include some very real locations. Chief among them is Mount Haruna (known as Mount Akina to the Initial D fans) and its world-famous pass. It’s not a 1:1 recreation, but it’s around 95% there, which is more than we could have ever asked for, and it’s a pleasure to drive there both uphill and downhill.
What sets Japan apart from Mexico isn’t just the biome variance, though it helps immensely. Playground Games also made the new map around 20-25% bigger and denser at the same time. Where in Mexico we had plains and huge stretches of nothing, in Japan, we have roads criss-crossing into each other, small mountain trails, or picturesque vistas that cleanse the palate.
The game also has lots of verticality, as expected from the setting, which adds an additional layer to the map feeling huge. When you can’t really see the horizon, or even what’s coming after the next turn, you can’t just beeline from one end of the map to the other, the scope feels that much better.
One and possibly only complaint that I have is the one that has been parrotted around ever since the announcement: yes, the roads do feel a tad too wide. Japan is known for its economic approach to space management, especially within big cities. While Tokyo’s main highway feels properly wide, fast, and intimidating, the smaller roads within the city feel too open.
There’s the same feeling when driving around the mountain passes. At the real Mount Haruna, the lanes are barely wide enough to fit one car, there’s no runoff, and guardrails are right up the road surface. In Forza Horizon 6, there’s just less of that claustrophobic, intimidating feeling when racing downhill.
Understandably, this was likely made to make it feel less unforgiving, but having one or two properly scary courses over several dozen hours of gameplay wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Not just the setting, but the culture
Playground Games made it abundantly clear that Japan wasn’t chosen as Horizon’s next destination simply because it’s pretty and would sell more copies than the same game set elsewhere. They chose the Land of the Rising Sun for its car culture.
In case you didn’t notice by the number of Toyota Priuses in your hometown, Japan absolutely lives and breathes cars in all of their iterations. From small and hyper-efficient kei cars, microvans, and kei trucks, to Le Mans-winning track monsters that guzzle gasoline like nobody’s business, and everything in-between.
But more specifically, devs targeted one particular aspect of Japanese car culture: JDM.
JDM stands for Japanese Domestic Market, and is just an all-encompassing term for the cars made exclusively for and in Japan, regardless of the brand or initial origin. However, over time, it transformed into a cultural movement for those who are interested in authentic Japanese cars.
This got intertwined deeply with the country’s street racing and then tuner cultures to produce one of the most authentic, impossible to replicate elsewhere slices of car culture. Both the street racers, known as hashiriya, and car manufacturers were on it. That’s how we got Nissan Sileighty and Mitsuoka Le-Seyde, a gaudy and garish yet glorious abomination that a certain British farmer upgraded with real chandeliers.
You have the cars with all kinds of body kits, wrapped in decals and lit with neon, Miatas that barely fit their swapped engine, old Toyotas with 11,000 RPM monsters under the hood. Hopefully, the newest Car Meet feature will encourage people to show off both their best and most cursed creations.
Forza Horizon 6 celebrates all of this, especially through the story missions that Forza fans would remember from the previous games. Here, they’re more focused, not telling you random facts about the country or some problems of unremarkable characters. In Horizon 6, the game doesn’t even bother with showing you these characters’ faces half the time! The devs realized that we’re not here for them (unless we’re given a Horizon 1-style focused storyline, which won’t happen ever again, sadly), we’re here for the cars!
Regional tours give us genuinely interesting and useful information about the history of Japanese cars and makes. Workshop missions have us source, test, and deliver interesting vehicles for a renowned mechanic to kit out and upgrade, JDM style. Drifting club storyline has us go from being rookies, immersing ourselves into the drift culture, retracing the footsteps of the drifting giants like Keiichi Tsuchiya from tight mountain passes to legitimate drifting arenas.
Playground Games even got a world-renowned automotive photographer, Larry Chen, who wants us to help him take breathtaking pictures for the cover of the country’s number one car magazine (though, for some very weird reason, we don’t get to see the final fruits of our labor). With Horizon Promo returning and giving you rewards for capturing both landmarks and cars, this was an ingenious addition to the game.
But therein also lies a disconnect. Forza Horizon 5 was very particular about reminding me that “We’re at the Horizon Festival, amigo!” Every story beat, every mission, everything circled back to it, the whole Mexican culture was celebrated through the festival lens. In Horizon 6, I genuinely barely remembered half the time that there was supposed to be some kind of festival going on. Sure, when we were gathering and tuning those cars, it was for the festival, but it was nothing more than a passing mention for something that went out of its way to celebrate the tuner culture first and foremost. Even the Horizon Rush events felt like this, one of them even involved a giant mech based on the RX-78F00 Gundam mech at Yamashita Pier in Yokohama, and a Shinkansen train.
No one buzzed my ear off with just how amazing I am and how great the festival is. When I gathered those points and wristbands I needed for progression, it felt more like a pure gameplay thing, rather than something that specifically exists within the story.
While I like this way more than the ever-present toxic positivity of Horizon 5, this still felt like a half-measure. I’d like to say it was a step in the right direction, but it was more of a sideways one. At this point, Horizon Festival feels like a skeleton to build the game around, an excuse to have the game set in the particular location. But I also get that it’s in the name of the series, and kind of its essence, to the point where some other franchises clumsily borrow the concept. Hello, Crew: Motorfest (admittedly, Forza wasn’t the first on this “car festival” train, NFS Pro Street was years ahead).
To be clear, the issue with Forza Horizon 5’s approach wasn’t just that the Festival was right front and center, it’s that it wasn’t done particularly well. Instead of Horizon 6’s “it kinda exists” approach, I’d much prefer something more tangible, something that has stakes, like Horizon 1 did, or for it to be dropped completely.
I know that this isn’t what most of the newish Forza Horizon fans want. After this game was revealed, I read a comment that made me regret having eyesight, which said that Forza was finally “locationmaxxing.” But then I realized that this is how newer fans perceive the series, and this is what the devs respond to.
I grew up with arcade racers like Burnout: Takedown, Need for Speed: Underground 2, Most Wanted, and Carbon, Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition. These games either had meaningful progression, actual storylines, or both. With the deep crisis that racing games are currently in, no one is doing any of that anymore. And having played Horizon 1 and having seen how it can be, I’m asking the series that’s no longer it to do the thing it no longer tries to do.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to argue that Forza Horizon 6 is doing “locationmaxxing,” and it’s doing it phenomenally well.
The drivers of progress
One of the biggest complaints everyone had about Forza Horizon 5 was the lack of meaningful progress. You were a legend of the Festival, everything was at your fingertips, made for you, tailored to you. You got showered with cars, credits, activities, to the point of losing interest in even trying.
Playground Games evidently took this feedback to heart and brought back the old-school, Forza Horizon 1-style wristband-gated progression to 6. Except, they didn’t, really. At least, not completely.
The original game had this “cheap car to dream car” progression along with the wristband system. You did get some good cars early, but hypercars felt like a real milestone to reach. The next game loosened that up. You got access to more powerful cars sooner, and the road trip structure made the game feel more open.
Forza Horizon 3 was the turning point. Since you were the festival boss, the game treated you like someone building a massive car party. Wheelspins, rewards, barn finds, showcases, all of this made progression softer.
Forza Horizon 4 went full dopamine machine. Wheelspins, Super Wheelspins, seasonal rewards, Forzathon Shop, gifts, DLC packs, and playlist cars meant the game constantly threw vehicles at you. With some of the editions, you started the game with hypercars in your garage. Forza Horizon 5 quadrupled down on this, as if it was terrified you might be bored for 11 seconds.
So while Forza Horizon 6 did indeed bring back the wristband-gated progression, which requires you to race in inferior cars for a set amount of races, it also constantly—albeit at a lower frequency—gives you ridiculous cars early on, and you can race them in open events and challenges scattered around the world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very happy that the series pumped its brakes on the dopamine slot machine, it’s just I expected more after the devs’ hype and comments.
For many, this won’t even matter. Lots of people come to play Forza just for its online component, and fair enough. They will get exactly the experience they look for: Forza Horizon never stopped being the best pure arcade racing game to play against real humans for fun.
His Imperial Majesty, the Gameplay
Some games have this effect, where you complain about some details, have minor gripes with specific elements, and then you start actually playing it and forget them all. Forza Horizon 6 is that kind of game.
The previous entry was already very good in terms of handling, sense of speed (though nothing has ever reached the heights of NFS Most Wanted in this aspect), and feedback from various surfaces. All of this is refined even further in Horizon 6.
Now, you really feel like there’s a tangible limit to your grip, it was made more realistic. For example, braking while turning will lead to one of the two outcomes: your rear will step out on you, and you will crash, or you won’t be able to rotate the car enough, understeer, and crash. This makes late lunges less effective (although you can always have the car slowed down by simply ramming into your opponent, true Forza style), and opens new cornering strategies like taking a square racing line and be really early on the power, having barely cleared the apex. That’s not to say that you can’t still try to use your muscle memory to play the way you did, especially if you have the assists on (traction control sands down all the edges), or even drift around every corner, but the game even spells it out for you: that’s a slower way to race, and grip is king.
The best place to test all of this is the new event type that’s inherently tied to Japan: Touge. Touge is a downhill (and/or uphill) race between two cars. It has various sets of rules, like a cat-and-mouse style of race where a powerful car starts behind the weaker one and has to overtake it, or the uphill and downhill sections with alternating leaders. Unfortunately, Forza Horizon 6 has the most boring option, the one where both cars start side by side, and the first one to cross the finish line is the winner. This is understandable, as the game’s mechanics simply won’t allow for any other mode to be satisfying and not end within 5 seconds. To this day, the only mainstream racing game to properly implement this style of racing was NFS Carbon, and even that game achieved it by significantly altering the gameplay mechanics for this one specific type of race. Unfortunately, with a scope as significant as Forza Horizon, this isn’t really a feasible option.
The other issue Touge races have is insane rubber-banding. This was likely an intentional design decision, considering how easy it is in general to overtake in this game and then never see the front bumper of your opponents, even on higher difficulty settings. But in Touge, an opponent I accidentally threw off the cliff, managed to reset and then catch up to me, and I’m far from a bad driver.
Another new event type in Horizon 6 is the time attack, held on specific dedicated racing circuits scattered across the Tokyo area. It’s an open-world event, so you can enter it whenever, with whichever car you prefer. Leaderboards are segregated by the car class and reset every week. Strangely enough, you can use your rewind without losing your time as you do in Rivals mode, so this looks to be fairly abusable. Expect some overly dedicated players to post impossible lap times by eliminating every single mistake through the rewind feature. Still, yay for variety!
Vehicles of forward locomotion
What would a Forza game be without an extensive library of cars? Probably just a worse game. Fortunately, Forza Horizon 6 boasts a phenomenal roster of vehicles from various makes and brands. Over 500, in fact, if we disqualify the Forza Editions and other variations.
Many of them are new to the series, but even the older ones have rescanned models that look better than ever with the new ray-traced visuals and overall higher fidelity.
Unfortunately, we still have this vague and mysterious Performance Index that doesn’t really reflect how good any given car is or isn’t. The system still underrates grip and weight, but it looks to have started giving more value to brakes, and some of the most ridiculous engine swaps were nerfed. Still, expect the meta players to game the PI as easily as before while devising their monstrous vehicles from hell.
Playground Games improved the decal system in Horizon 5, but unfortunately, nothing else in the tuning department was made visibly better. There are still only a couple of front and rear wing options per car, wheel rims have some glaring omissions, and aftermarket, non-Forza wings still don’t allow for downforce customization. It’s quite incomprehensible why this is still a thing, as it looks to be such an easy option to implement.
Still, there are enough options to make something unique, something that will make your car truly yours. Or not yours, for that matter, if you want to cosplay as Takumi Fujiwara and cruise around on a Toyota AE86 with the Tofu Shop logo on its door and RS Watanabe F8 rims on its wheels. Some of the pre-tuned cars could be found in one of the many used car sales places for a significant discount. This feels like the best place to acquire cars in Horizon 6.
While it’s understandable that the more cars you have in your game, the fewer unique customization options you can really implement, but in a game so dedicated to Japan and its car culture, this still feels disappointing.
Running in the… 2026?
Oh, how I wish I didn’t have to write this section. Music has always been a huge part of what makes great racing games great. People still hum Most Wanted songs, yet mute music in newer NFS games. Forza has always had some gems across its many radio stations, and Horizon 6 is no exception.
However.
Forza Horizon 6 has no Super Eurobeat. It barely has City Pop. What it does have is a list of currently popular Japanese flavor-of-the-month songs devoid of any cultural significance.
It’s understandable that Playground Games wants Horizon 6 to stand on its own, and maybe the devs thought that adding Super Eurobeat songs would be too big of a “look, look, I’m just like your favorite anime Initial D” moment. But this is the same studio that put Toyota Sprinter Trueno GT Apex racing against a yellow Mazda RX-7 in the release trailer, and overall, put Toyota AE86 front and center of the marketing campaign. Therefore, I can’t really understand why there is no feature that so many people have asked for. If you can afford so much of YOASOBI, Ado, and Babymetal, you can afford the entire Super Eurobeat and City Pop scene twice over.
Checkered Flag
With all the minor gripes out of the way, it’s truly difficult not to enjoy the game for what it offers: the best driving experience within the most suitable of locations. Nothing matters when I can just drive my Silvia around Tokyo, casually drifting through every corner, drinking in the atmosphere and vibes, or slowly descending from Mount Haruna, kicking up all the sakura petals from the surface, staring at the majestic Fuji-san in the distance.
It’s genuinely funny, but the meme is correct: set anywhere else, Forza Horizon 6 wouldn’t have had the same effect as it did in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Forza Horizon 6 truly is the Racing Game, Japan.
- The entire Japanese setting is a major win.
- Phenomenal visuals and performance.
- Updated progression systems.
- Driving cars in Horizon 6 is pure joy.
- Festival started to feel like a gimmick.
- Customization remained largely the same.
- Updates to progression could be pushed more.
- No Super Eurobeat.
