Ever since I played Forza Horizon 5 back in 2021, it’s been my favorite racing game of all time. The over-the-top action, the tight controls, the expansive garage of vehicles, and, of course, the beautiful representation of Mexico all made me fall in love with Forza Horizon 5 – so much so that it’s tied for the highest review score I’ve awarded in my nearly 11 and a half years at Game Informer. So it stands to reason that I was thrilled to hear that Forza Horizon 6 was heading to my favorite real-world travel destination: Japan. I had the chance to speed around Japan across a few events in the first hour of the main campaign, as well as participate in some free exploration, and came away extremely ready to slide into the driver’s seat once again.
As is expected in the Forza Horizon series at this point, racing around feels fantastic. The physics, surface simulation, and sense of speed all feel in line with the best-in-class prior entries. And with Japan as the backdrop, I cherished every moment in this short, fun preview experience. And it all starts with the introductory Initial Drive.
The Initial Drive sequence in Forza Horizon 5 left an indelible mark on me, as cars dropped out of the sky, sped down highways, and stormed through deserts en route to Horizon Festival Mexico. In Forza Horizon 6, the player’s entry point into Japan is a bit more understated. You still jump around to different cars to drive different routes, serving as a high-level preview of the sights as you blaze through the Horizon Festival over what is likely to be the next dozens of hours to come, but the cars aren’t dropping out of the sky. Still, the Horizon Festival is at the center of both this sequence and the events I was able to play.
“The Festival has been a core element in all Horizon games, and for the most recent one, we kind of wanted to step back and approach the Festival a bit differently,” art director Don Arceta says. “Primarily, we wanted to treat it as a global event – something as big as the World Cup or the Olympics, but obviously centered around car culture and music. And when we put the lens on that, we started thinking how this could exist in Japan. And it’s a little bit different; it’s a little more what you’d expect from a big, organized event. You have barriers guarding off city roads, you have, obviously, the big festival site. There are sponsors. We have marshals, we have volunteers… everything that would make up a festival. We wanted to capture that and help sell a little bit of that world-building and narrative in our Initial Drive, and that was just one part that helped shape that. In terms of world-building and storytelling, there’s a little bit more of that in our Initial Drive, which helps carry some of that cinematic nature.”
The team dialed back the fantastical elements in that Initial Drive, instead emphasizing the notion of what it would be like to visit Japan and find yourself a part of the Horizon Festival. I see that play out in the early hours as my character is informed their friend entered them into the qualifier races. This also means you’ll see, in addition to the official festival events, a lot more Grassroots Circuits, which allow you to tackle real-world time attacks run by local groups.
“When we were researching all these Grassroots Circuits, there’s a wide variety of them, and it really helped us when thinking about our biomes and where things are located,” Arceta says. “Those were one of the grounding elements that helped us decide, ‘Yeah, we should get this biome because it offers us this type of time attack circuit, or this one.’ So, there was a little big of ebb and flow between the two elements. Obviously, when we’re choosing our biomes, a big part of it is what roads exist there. […] There is a lot of gameplay and road types that are informed by the areas we choose.”
Speaking of areas, at least in the preview build, the only major metropolitan area appears to be Tokyo. I was hoping to at least get either Osaka or Kyoto in addition to Tokyo, but that does not appear to be the case; the map in my build cut off around Kawazu Nanadaru and the famous Hakone Nanamagari drifting course, which is a few hours south of Tokyo in real-world drive time. However, despite the extremely contracted nature of Tokyo itself – it would be really difficult to truly capture the forever-sprawling nature of the real-world city – the recreation of the city is as stunning as you’d expect, with beautiful versions of Shibuya, Minato, and other notable areas. But extending outside of Tokyo, I loved seeing the Touge roads and the infamous Tateyama Snow Corridor in the Japanese Alps. Playground Games has clearly captured the beauty of Japan’s many biomes.
The premise of visiting Japan and suddenly being entered into the Horizon Festival extends to the types of cars I drove during my hands-on time, as my preview build started me with three vehicles of varying specialties, two of which are Japanese icons. The 1989 Nissan Silvia K’s is a solid choice for street racing, while the 1994 Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205 helped me conquer the rally event in the preview build. Finally, the Japanese market isn’t typically renowned for its off-road vehicles, so Playground provided me with a 1970 GMC Jimmy to tackle that Horizon Festival qualifier event.
But don’t worry if those starting vehicles don’t excite you; as the box art of Forza Horizon 6, which features the 2025 Toyota GR GT prototype, clearly tells you, you’ll find yourself behind the wheel of a ton of incredible speed machines throughout your time in this Japanese playground. But my time was spent with these three vehicles, participating in the qualifiers ahead of the main campaign progression in the full game, as well as various PR stunts, including Speed Traps, Drift Zones, and Danger Sign ramps. There are, of course, various collectibles scattered throughout the map, too, including XP bonus boards and cute mascots you can smash through. When stacked with the avalanche of events once you’re actually a part of the festival in the main game, it does not seem as though there will be any shortage of activities to take part in.
“The preview build is what we call the Qualifier Phase, which leads you up to the Festival,” design director Torben Ellert says. “There’s just this huge swath of content in that element of the campaign, which includes all of the street races and the Touge races and Touge battles that are in the game. We thought about it as that split: If you traveled to Japan today and you knew the right people, you could probably get in a car and race on the C1 Loop, and aligning that with longstanding street racing in the Horizon Festival, that made a lot of sense for us as a way to split it out. So, in the festival element of the campaign, things are quite structured, right? Events lock in, in a sequence, they have car restrictions, the cars start slow and get faster as you build up. But in the full version of the game, when you explore the map, and you find a street race, for example, you can take any car into that, and the grid will adapt to match that. It was a way for us to have the freedom of exploration and freedom of certain kinds of racing, while having other kinds that were more structured and more progression-oriented. I think the authenticity of that kind of racing culture in Japan made it just a really natural way to split that content out.”
I close out my conversation with the Forza Horizon 6 developers by asking if I can park my car on the Shinkansen tracks and get annihilated by the bullet train, which can reach up to 200mph. “Uh, y-yes,” Ellert says with a laugh. “I’m certain that you’re aware of the Speed Trap benefits that that can have.”
Even though I spent a couple of hours speeding around the map, there are still so many areas I haven’t even come close to visiting, and I’m okay with that. I want the final game to hit me the way Forza Horizon 5 did back in 2021, and the best way to experience Forza Horizon maps is when they’re full of activities. These early hours I played are promising, but I won’t know for sure what the ceiling is on Forza Horizon 6 until it launches on May 19.