With Forza Horizon 6 imminently coming up on the, well, horizon, now is a good time for newcomers and returning players to get up to speed with the Forza Horizon story thus far. I’m serious. Stop making that face and hear me out: what if I told you that the Forza Horizon series does have a strong narrative through-line? That it is, in fact, an epic of almost biblical ambition?First of all, it’s a persistent universe full of recurring characters and callbacks. But more importantly, the story of Forza Horizon is about a bitter clash between two competing visions for civilization. A battle not just for a place on the podium, but for the very soul of humankind. A war between the car and the train. Yes, this is about to get more than a little silly. But stick with me, even if it’s just to remember all the really cool stuff you did in the previous five Forza Horizon games. Forza Horizon: Home TurfIt’s the halcyon summer of 2012. America’s breadbasket shudders to the piston-knocking thump of EDM. This is the Horizon Festival, and for its attendees the drug of choice is torque, and the real danger that it could all go horribly wrong in a split-second. This is America. This is the cult of the motor car.The original Forza Horizon game is the quintessential American hero’s journey: a young man with a head full of dreams and a tank full of mid-grade taking on a succession of bigger fish in better cars. A bland player-insert protagonist with a wardrobe full of copyright safe t-shirts throttling up the ranks like nobody’s ever seen before. Untested faith is the spiritual equivalent of a service station sandwich. The cult of the motor car demands scalps. Aeroplanes, helicopters, even hot air balloons – anything that dares look down on tarmac is fair game for having its face rubbed in it. The car will race all of them. Any of them. Doesn’t matter how absurd it is to pit a land vehicle against something that literally flies in the air. This is a twelve year-old’s fantasy, damn you, stop bringing logic into this.The first of Horizon’s machine vs. machine showcase events would be a legendary tussle between Mustangs: a 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 429 taking on a P-51 Mustang Fighter Plane. Each a vision of America’s core identity. The very symbol of US air superiority in World War 2 against the iconic muscle car, an expression of raw V8 power that has the fuel efficiency and cornering of a steam boat. This landmark contest proves unequivocally that the Horizon Festival isn’t just another stuffy, tedious exhibition of spinning wheels, like Formula One, but something of grander, spiritual purpose. In Landlocked Colorado, the car’s reign is undisputed. To keep spreading its gospel, the Horizon Festival would need to look beyond the spiritual home of the automobile to places where municipal transport links are so good that a lot of people don’t even bother learning to drive at all. The weirdos.Forza Horizon 2: EurothrashForza Horizon 2. Miles and miles of coastal highway set across two of the most car-loving nations outside of the USA: France, home of the pokey little hatchback, and Italy, motherland of the mid-engined sports car. Horizon 2014 would eschew the idea of a centrally-located car show operating in parallel with regular life, preferring to balloon into an impossibly vast, virtually endless festival with multiple locations, incorporating elements of that most civilised, politely European form of motorsport: the grand tour. Or, if you prefer, the Road Trip.And the showcase events return in style: kicking off with an opportunity for military planes to save face as the Italian air force’s Frecce Tricolori display team face off against a 2003 Ferrari Challenge Stradale. The car wins, obviously. As it does against several dozen hot air balloons, in a bizarre rematch that nobody asked for.It’s clear, of course, that cars and air vehicles are not natural rivals. The car’s greatest adversary is not skybound, it’s earthbound. It is something that is antithetical to everything the car represents. Self-reliance. Taking to the open road with your trusty steed. Being able to get out and grab a cheeky KFC. The serpent that slithers on a fixed path despises these virtues. It is everything the car exists to overcome. Transport’s most bitter feud is between tarmac and iron railing.The train is subsidised mass-transport with inadequate luggage space and elbow room. The train is a prison of the mind and body. In short, cars equal freedom. Sexy time. Eagles. Trains equal socialism and having to stop for other people. But for all their rigidity and inflexibility, trains are shockingly fast: untroubled by the concept of split-second manoeuvrability, the train is a Victorian moon rocket laid on its side, pointed in a binary direction, and ignited with hell’s flatulence. So it comes as no surprise that the very first showcase featuring a train – in this case a race between a sleek steam-powered passenger locomotive and a gorgeous 1968 Lancia – is a neck-and-neck battle that comes down to fractions of a second. Classic train vs classic car, old world sensibilities vs modern self-driven convenience. Though the car would narrowly win in 2014, there would be an overhanging sense of unfinished business.Inspired by the golden sunshine and coastal beauty of the riviera, but probably unwilling to suffer another European drenching, the next Horizon festival would move on to Southern Australia.Forza Horizon 3: AustentatiousWith its diverse mix of coastal urbanity, farmland, and bush, Horizon Australia would set a new standard of shock and awe for the motor festival. In tying its showcase events to its social media followers, the Horizon organisers created a winning feedback loop of fan engagement and ever higher stakes: the road car would pit itself once again against the usual jets and helicopters, but see its now-traditional bout against large bags of gas replaced by the intense visual feast of a dinky two-cylinder off-road buggy facing off against an enormous, low-flying airship, a race featuring heart-stopping jumps and stalking sky shark reminiscent of the opening shot of Star Wars. With the road car taking a back seat, there was now a sense that this latest slapfight between land and sky constituted more friendly banter between colleagues than genuine rivalry. With neither side having anything left to prove, the only real spectacle was in the sheer size difference between the opponents.Australia’s keen watersporting traditions would inspire a new kind of race. The River Run showcase proved that there could be genuine competition between vehicles that operate on entirely different principles and infrastructure by having a tricked out Toyota Baja truck race in parallel against a load of power boats.But once again, the most bitter of all competitions this year would be road vs rail. The Freight Expectations showcase would summon the unassailable power of the diesel locomotive in an attempt to humble the motor car: specifically, in this case, the unapologetically American 2015 Chevrolet Camaro. A clash of civilisations with real stakes: it now being possible for the train to smack into you, violently, if your driving sucks badly enough.With the train grudge ever prominent, it is perhaps not surprising that the next Horizon festival would take place in the United Kingdom: a damp archipelago with horizontal storms and barely any money in the treasury to fix potholes, its motorsport heritage is perhaps second only to its status as the birthplace of the railway.Forza Horizon 4: Blimey Guv’norTaking place in an inexplicably truncated Great Britain where Edinburgh is somehow the only major settlement and a five minute drive from The Cotswolds, 2018’s Horizon festival would once again feature a slew of showcase events pitting the car against the host country’s air force: the Vulcan vs Vulcan heritage race featured a Vulcan Bomber Jet pulling apocalyptic turns against an Aston Martin Vulcan, both proud symbols of British engineering. Maritime excursions continued to form part of proceedings, with an iconic mud-wrestle between a Toyota Baja truck and an honest to goodness hovercraft providing a curious challenge to the bewheeled automobile: a boat that can go on roads. A land boat. An abomination, in other words. But Britain is the home turf of the train, and the most famous one of all would be chosen to represent rail in its ongoing grudge against the road: The Flying Scotsman. Seventy feet of furnace at the head of some of the most luxurious cabins in passenger transportation, it stands in sharp contrast to the Ariel Nomad racing with it; a rocket-powered shopping cart engineered to be as light as possible to attain roughly the same horses per ton as a Ferrari F430.Again, this is a clash of ideologies: raw, singularly applied power vs overbearing decadence. The car wins, obviously, and crucially, can further demonstrate its supremacy by heading through the nearest drive thru for a McFlurry, which would incidentally be far more in-keeping with Britain’s existing car culture than Horizon’s distinctly American flavour of it: big, bombastic, and brimming with sponsorship cash. In contrast, British car culture is mostly nine dudes in a McDonald’s car park revving a demuffled Renault Clio.Having presumably written off the whole British experiment as a bad idea, along with most of the commonwealth, the next Horizon Festival would make a gleeful return to sun-soaked coasts and food you can actually taste.Forza Horizon 5: CarpocalyptoMexico! A blistering coast-to-coast road trip of a festival with stunning beaches, vast stretches of roomy highways, and even a volcano, there couldn’t have been a more deliberate contrast with Great Britain. With an enthusiast car culture rivalling the USA’s, Horizon 2021’s showcase events would become more involved than ever before with the inclusion of expeditions: making a grand spectacle out of not just motorsports, but of the very land hosting it.Forza Horizon 5 would save the now firmly established Car vs Train grudge match for its final showcase event, with a palette-swapped Horizon 3 Freight Train returning to set the record straight against the heartbreakingly iconic Lamborghini Countach, possibly the most beautiful supercar ever designed – guaranteed this thing spent the eighties pinned up on more bedroom walls than Farrah Fawcett – in Mexico’s Copper Canyon, a breathtaking landscape of enormous economical and ecological importance to the country and therefore the perfect stage for an absurdly wasteful contest between gas-guzzling apples and carbon-belching oranges.In a shocking narrative twist, the car wins again, and to do so with a Lamborghini Countach as its champion adds a grave insult to to this particular defeat, given that it is an automobile whose natural advantages over rail are greatly diminished by the fact that it’s too wide for drive thru and has the turning circle of a small moon.Forza Horizon 6: ShinkanzillaThe next Horizon festival is just around the corner, and it has once again chosen as its backdrop a rain-soaked island nation famous for its castles, its constitutional monarchy, its historically antagonistic relationship with all of its immediate neighbours, and an intricate culture of weaponised politeness. No, not Britain again, thank god, but a fresh start in what is widely considered the global capital of street racing: Tokyo, and the Surrounding Area.Home to as many storied car brands as the UK but with a much healthier automotive industry to actually support that heritage, Japan counts as the car’s home turf as much as anywhere else possibly could. And yet, this is hostile ground, for it is also a country whose homegrown category of superfast railway serves as a piece of national branding. A landmark of every bit as iconic as France’s Eiffel Tower, Italy’s Colosseum, or Britain’s replacement bus services: the Shinkansen. Globally admired as The Bullet Train, this is 700 tonnes of pristine passenger transport hauled at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour, smoothly tipped, polished and gleaming like something from Ann Summers ramming itself through the countryside. It is the apex of locomotion. If municipal rail is Skynet, Shinkansen is its T-1000: Terrifying. Undefeatable. Surprisingly polite.And also, fully electric. Which, even in a world mid-pivot toward hybrid hypercars and poxy iPhones on wheels, feels like an existential challenge to the cult of the motor car backed with technological spite. In an ever uncertain future for the role of personal transport, the gleaming white serpent of Nippon is the final boss of trains.With not a single power plant at the tip but a distributed system of electric motors throughout the length of its 16-carriages, the Bullet Train evokes a sense of society to which the car does not belong. Thousands of moving parts shifting people in unison, not directly to all of their exact destinations, but in a broadly similar direction.Shinkansen embodies the very concept of collectivism. And that is why it must be crushed at this year’s Horizon festival, by a car going slightly faster than it in a point-to-point race meticulously devised to deliver such a result.Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn't fawning over Assassin's Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN's YouTube channel!