Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A simulator with a full wall of assists in front of it, so the same corner can be a formality or a genuine test depending on what you left switched on.

Two games glued together, and the management half is where a run is actually lost — a starving flock undoes a perfectly good dungeon.

Hard in a way that always moves forward: you lose the run but never the hour, because failure is the currency the next attempt is bought with.

Real-time pressure with an ATB gauge underneath it. Bosses are staggered checklists, and the materia loadout decides whether a fight is a wall or a formality.

Single-player is as gentle as you set it; Ultimate Team online is a different game where defending is manual and everyone else has practised it.

The friendliest the series has been — focus strikes, a mount that finds the monster for you — and the tempered fights at the end still ask for the matchup knowledge Monster Hunter always did.

Reflex mode quietly saves every blown infiltration. Turn it off and the enemy adapts to whatever you did last mission, which is where the game gets interesting.

Machines have components you are meant to shoot off with the right element. A player who ignores that fights the same Thunderjaw for ten minutes with the wrong arrows.

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.

The build carries the game. A netrunner or a sandevistan trivialises fights that a scattered stat spread makes unwinnable, and the difficulty setting only changes the numbers underneath that.