Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.