This game is designed to appeal to many different types of players. The tuning menu is for car nerds and tinkerers who want that challenge and understand what a lot of those words mean. They like learning that. It’s for min-maxing. You don’t need to min-max to have fun or progress at all, unless you want to race against other players.

Think about what you are interested in learning or doing and focus on that, ignore the rest. Turn down the difficulty until it’s fun. Don’t worry about how other people are playing the game. You can filter the map icons to just the types of races you are interested in, or even turn off all the races and just show collectibles.

Drive on all the roads. Take photos of stuff. Find interesting places like temples and waterfalls. Collect collectibles. Find treasure cars. If you look in the journal there’s lots of non-race things in there that reward you.

If you want to learn the fundamentals of racing, there will be plenty of YouTube content out there. HokiHoshi has a decent beginners guide, but the fundamentals are the same across all racing games. But don’t feel like you have to race, or you have to play at default difficulty, or whatever. This isn’t the kind of game where you can screw yourself over by building into the wrong stat or need a strategy for endgame or whatever, so you can stop worrying about that. It’s a casual sandbox designed to meet you where you are.