Exactly right. The industry as a whole is slowly beginning to re-contextualize the view/design of game difficulty as being a matter of accessibility rather than only through the prism of skill.
Ideally you want your game to have lowest barrier of entry / highest ceiling of incentive to the player; you want to appeal to both the hardcore gamer and the potential for new unfamiliar players. You want to do so in a way that is intuitive, fair, and respectful of the player's time. The player should be motivated to return to the game to improve and because it's fun to do so.
SoR-4 seems to understand/execute that well, just based on the description. Playing it tonight, looking forward to it.
We played River City Girls as the most recent beat-em-up, which was enjoyable if a bit tedious toward the end. That game definitely would've benefitted from an ability to skip or over-power yourself to cheese certain bosses.
Friend of mine, lifelong Nintendo gamer, neither 'core' or 'casual' but somewhere in-between (longtime player but not especially skilled) puts his frustration toward game difficulty incentivizing like this -- "Oh yes, everybody's favorite part about playing a video game. Completing the campaign and getting a C minus and told to try again. Thanks for buying and using our product; by the way, we think you're trash."
