Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The inputs were made easy so the system could be hard. Roman Cancel is four mechanics behind one button, and every match above the low floors is decided by who used it correctly.

The single-player is genuinely welcoming; ranked is a decade of other people’s practice delivered eight frames at a time.

Auto-combos hide a genuinely deep three-character team fighter. The gap between mashing the light button and an assist-extended combo is the entire learning curve.

You can finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

The combos are the advertised difficulty and the easy part. The real one is movement — walking, backdashing and sidestepping are the skill, and no mode in the game teaches them.

Parry-first combat with windows tight enough that blocking on reflex fails and blocking on rhythm works.

Individually the easiest execution in the genre and the most reading: strings are simple, but every one of them is a decision about whether the assist you also picked is available.

Runs are fast and deaths are total. Boss cells stack modifiers until a loadout that felt comfortable dies to two hits, and there is no difficulty setting hiding under them.

A platform fighter with three attack buttons and no movelists to memorise, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether the genre is for you.

Hazard 5 with four dwarves is a coordination problem. Solo with Bosco is a slower, different game that the hazard tiers do not really account for.