Forza Horizon 6 Cultural Advisor Details Making of Japan With Daily Life at CEDEC 2026
Playground Games hired a cultural consultant for the first time in the series, a shift that followed the previous installment making the need for such a role clear.
Key Facts
- Kyoko Yamashita served as cultural consultant for Forza Horizon 6, her first time in that role on a game.
- Playground Games hired a cultural consultant for the first time in the Forza Horizon series, following the previous installment.
- Yamashita worked with the game staff on Forza Horizon 6 for two and a half years.
- Eight key members of the development team toured Tokyo for about a week, including driving in Hakone.
- The four seasons were the most frequently raised topic in the team's questions to Yamashita.
Reporting from 2 sources: GameBusiness.jp, Inside.
At CEDEC 2026, held July 22 to 24 at Pacifico Yokohama North, Kyoko Yamashita took the stage to explain her work as cultural consultant for Forza Horizon 6, developed by UK studio Playground Games. Yamashita joined Square Soft in 1997 as a marketing assistant and later became independent, working as a business consultant and interpreter. She said this was her first time serving as a cultural advisor on a game, and that she was chosen because of her long industry career, her work preventing cultural misunderstandings for companies, and her love of cars. When she joined the project in the UK, there was no Japanese staff or anyone who spoke Japanese, so she began by introducing basic facts about Japan. The team's goal was not a postcard view but a Japan with a sense of daily life, one that would feel natural even to Japanese people. To achieve this, she recommended the team visit Japan, and eight key members toured Tokyo for about a week, driving in Hakone and using taxis, trains, and the Shinkansen. The team's questions, collected in a dedicated message box, covered the four seasons, festivals, shop signs, and landmarks. Yamashita worked on the title for two and a half years.
- Yamashita joined Square Soft in 1997 and handled marketing and PR for nearly 30 titles, including the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series.
- Playground Games runs two teams, one on Forza Horizon and one on Fable, scheduled for release next year.
- She described her role as guiding a team that already had a vision, making sure expressions did not become disrespectful through rule violations, value differences, or misunderstandings of manners.
- Her work covered visual and art teams, game design, sound, scenario, and auditions for DJ personalities on in-game radio stations.
- She distinguished her job from localization: localization translates and arranges text, language, UI, and audio for a target market, while a cultural advisor is involved in "the content itself being created."
- During the Tokyo research trip, one member said, "The most striking point is the astonishing tranquility within orderly chaos," and the other staff nodded in agreement.
- Japan's character culture shaped the in-game stamp rally. Staff were surprised by the size of highway service areas and realized, "Japanese people have grown up with characters and mascots like this."
- The four seasons were the most frequent question topic. Yamashita said seasonal changes are "like Japan's DNA," and expressing them was decided from the start of planning.
- Map area names were kept in Japanese rather than translated into English. Yamashita does not remember why the in-game location "Otani" got that name.
- She quoted her own summary: "A single house on a country road, taxis running in Tokyo, carefully driving your own car through narrow streets packed with shops. By carefully depicting such signs of daily life, I think it turned out in a way that makes the Japaneseness stand out even more."
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.