Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A hero shooter that lets you fly and climb walls, so the sightlines are three-dimensional in a way that punishes shooter habits learned on flat maps.

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.

Aim matters less than knowing what the other team can do to you, and the roster is large enough that this takes a very long time to learn.

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

Aggressive rather than punishing — dying costs you almost nothing, so the walls are boss-shaped and the rest is spectacle.

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.

Building is a second game bolted to the first, played at a speed that looks like a bug, and the mode that removes it is where most people should start.

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.

Turn-based with a parry or dodge on every incoming attack, so a fight you have the stats for can still be lost by hands. Learning a boss’s rhythm is the build.

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.