Character Archetypes

Characters are designed to be best-suited toward some general approaches.

• Offensive characters want to get up close and set up mix-ups in their favor, and their success tends to be momentum-based.
• Balanced characters can play an opportunistic game, using mid range as a staging ground. They are also adaptable to more offensive or defensive play, as the situation or preference dictates.
• Defensive characters stay at ranges where they can zone effectively while reacting to incursions against their position. There’s a lot of variance between the defensive characters in how they actually achieve this.
• Grapplers smash! Grapplers tend to want to get close and deploy their untechable command grabs. Their brand of getting close is distinct from that of offensive-archetype characters.

Characters don’t have to be played this way, but this is how they were designed. Within each category, characters are listed in order of intended difficulty of play, from easiest to hardest. Again, this is not a hard-set parameter but a tool to help think about the characters, and perhaps to help select which you’ll practice. And, as mentioned in “Classifying Player Archetypes,” your opponent’s character selection is the first clue about what kind of player they are.