The obvious consensus: Fighting games like Marvel Tōkon succeed despite their niche appeal because they finally nail the onboarding problem. Accessible tutorials and forgiving combo systems lower the barrier to entry. Reviewers praise this design choice. Players appreciate it. Everyone wins.
The better question: What happens to game criticism when we outsource the difficulty decision to writers instead of leaving it to players?
Let me be direct. I've watched this pattern repeat across reviews for years, and it's becoming harder to ignore. When a critic encounters a game with variable difficulty settings or intentionally punishing mechanics, they increasingly treat their own difficulty choice as a universal truth rather than a personal preference. They review the game as they played it, not as it could be played.
This matters more than you'd think.
A recent wave of coverage praised a particular FromSoftware title for its "grueling" design. The reviewer suffered through it. Documented the suffering. Made the suffering the story. Fair enough. But here's what got lost: Did they try the easier modes? Did they consider that their experience of pain was not everyone's experience of play? Or did the challenge itself become the review?
There's a difference between "this game is difficult" and "this game should only be reviewed by people who want difficulty." We've started collapsing these into the same statement.
The Marvel Tōkon situation clarifies this nicely. The game shipped with combo trials that hand-hold new players through execution. Reviewers called this elegant design. They were right. But notice what happened next: the praise reinforced a specific idea about how fighting games should onboard players. This becomes the new standard. This becomes what other fighting game developers now feel pressure to include.
I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm saying reviewers don't always acknowledge they're setting these standards through their coverage choices.
Consider the inverse. A game launches with three difficulty modes. A reviewer plays on hard mode and writes 1,500 words about how brutally unfair certain boss patterns feel. Another reviewer plays on normal mode and describes the same fight as perfectly balanced. Both reviews are honest. Both are based on their actual experience. But if the first review reaches more readers, or reaches more influential people, or just sounds more confident in its suffering, it shapes perception of what the game actually is.
Players see the praise for accessible tutorials and think: "Maybe I'm ready for this." Then they encounter a difficulty spike designed for a different audience entirely. The review didn't mention it because the reviewer didn't encounter it at that difficulty level. That's not malice. That's just how reviews work when the reviewer's personal settings become invisible context.
The real problem is that we've stopped naming this. Critics used to write "I played this on hard mode" the way they'd note any other relevant context. Increasingly, the difficulty choice becomes part of the natural texture of the review rather than a visible selection. It's just how the reviewer experienced it. Therefore, how you should experience it.
This breaks down especially with games that have intentional difficulty progression or games that genuinely want to challenge specific skill levels. When reviewers treat their difficulty choice as transparent rather than authored, they accidentally erase the game's actual structure from the conversation.
I'm not calling for reviews to include a difficulty disclaimer at the bottom like a nutrition label. I'm calling for critics to acknowledge that they're making a choice. That choice shapes what the review becomes. That choice should probably be visible to readers trying to figure out whether this experience is for them.
The consensus treats accessibility as a solved problem. The harder question is whether reviewers have become gatekeepers of the experience without acknowledging it.