Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Pure execution with zero consequence: you will restart a seven-second track four hundred times and enjoy every one of them.

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.

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.

The most welcoming fighting game ever made, sitting on top of the most undocumented one — the defensive techniques that decide real matches are never mentioned anywhere in it.

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.

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.

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

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.

Modern checkpoint generosity on the surface, with a completion layer underneath that wants every box and no deaths across a level built to cause both.

One hit kills, restarts land in under a second, and momentum is mandatory — stopping to think is usually the thing that kills you.