Watched the presentation when it showed up on my youtube feed. I used to like the series but fell off hard with 4 and 5. Fortnitified re-treads of the third the third game in my opinion, so my hype was muted.
But no they actually delivered the goods?
Five times bigger city than the last one sounds great, love to finally have one that isn't a 4 streets wide max. Roads outside the city even look interesting, that tight touge switchback looks glorious. The seasons have an actual visual impact again.
Some semblance of progression at least, and locking an entire island till after the campaign is very ballsy considering their main playerbase these days. Love it.
Garages like PGR. I also wished for houses you can go inside akin TDU, but the garage is already more than I expected. The building site looks cool as well.
Car remodels.... I almost don't want to give flowers here because rolling into a Japan Horizon game with 2005-made models would be an absolute disgrace. But better late than never, I guess. Small additions like window decals and 900-degree steering? Asked about for ages and they're finally doing it. Traffic cars refreshed after four games of the roster being almost the game.
Liked seeing the Honda Beat and the Honda City and that alone showed me they're already pulling more from the local car culture then they did from Mexico.
As for what I further want:
Cut down on the festival playlist FOMO. I've accepted the live service element of the game isn't going anywhere, but at least put the cars in the autoshow after a month instead of having to spend a fortune on auction house or waiting years for backstage.
No more character customization and moronic emotes, and cringe side characters are given the boot. Cut stories and bring back bucket lists unless the quality of the stories is greatly improved. Bonus if street racing has an illegal framing about it but they would never let the game be anything other E for everyone.
Good music selection that isn't butchered by censorship, and better yet a Spotify integration would be nice.
Overall I'm happy with what I saw. I totally get why they held off from doing Japan until next gen, imagine if this was FH4 and we got a puny town based on some village in Sapporo instead of Tokyo. Good call.
