The Coolest Fighting Game Characters
Image Credit: Arc System Works, Bandai Namco
One aspect of fighting games that I love is the sheer amount of creativity that the developers can put into their characters. Yes there are archetypes that the characters into, but the best characters are the ones that don’t quite fit into those typical archetypes. I love seeing how creative designers can be when things like restraints and balance are thrown out the window.
So today I want to talk about what I believe are four of the coolest characters across the fighting game sphere. Some of them I’ve played as, while others I’ve just observed from a safe distance and thought “Wow, they’re really neat”.
Also, for this article I’m going to be using numpad notation jargon. This is shorthand in fighting games for explaining inputs. The easiest way to explain it is to have you look at the number pad on the right side of your keyboard. Those are like the inputs of a D-Pad. 5 is neutral, 2 is down, 6 is right, etc. So if I say 236x, know that that’s short hand for quarter circle forward and a button. If I’m going to indoctrinate you all into playing fighting games you should at least speak the language!
I’m also going to assume, for no reason in particular, that you have a basic understanding of baseball.
Dante (Marvel VS Capcom 3)
Image Credit: Capcom, 8ing
Starting off with what I believe to be the coolest character ever, the developers over at Capcom and 8ing saw Dante from DMC3 and said “I want that in our fighting game!” True to his home game, Dante in Marvel VS Capcom 3 is a combo fiend with a gigantic movepool to allows the player to express themselves however they want. There’s also a ton of tech that you can learn with him if you want to improve your skill with him, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Dante features a staggering 23 Special moves, and 20 Command normals. A Command normal is just pressing a direction and a button, so for example you can do Stinger by pressing 6H (forward and Heavy). Dante is all about chaining his attacks into his Special moves. For just a basic combo you can use the game’s universal launcher into Clay Pidgeon to shoot the enemy, then cancel into Prop Shredder, which can then be canceled into his other Special moves.
Playing as Dante is like being handed paints and a massive canvas and being told “have fun”. You have everything that you’d ever need in a character. It’s up to you to learn how all of his tools work together. MVC3 Dante takes primarily from his appearance in DMC3, but there’s also a bit of DMC1 love thrown into the mix. I think that the only thing from DMC3 that doesn’t get a reference is the Spiral sniper rifle. Even Artemis, the shitty energy gun from DMC3 is here, and it’s his best tool for mixing up opponents on incoming.
The thing that you can use to elevate your Dante gameplay is his Bold Move Special move. Bold Move is a command hop that Dante has which can be used to immediately go airborne, allowing Dante to get some fast cross-up attacks with his jump Heavy. But Bold Move can also be used as a cancel option out of his Command normals (like Stinger). By doing what’s called a Bold Cancel, you can use Stinger (a great approach button) then cancel into literally any other Special move in Dante’s arsenal. Common options include Volcano, air and ground Trickster teleports, Crystal, Jam Session, and Reverb Shock. And this one simple Special move, done by pressing two buttons, turns Dante into an open-world character, free for you to explore however you want.
Sadly, Dante also teaches us a hard truth about fighting games. And that’s the fact that the “optimal” way to play a character doesn’t necessarily match the developers’ intentions. Typically in high level MVC3, Dante is seen as an Assist-Bot, as his Jam Session assist is one of the best moves in the game. Dante slides forward, shooting up a floor to ceiling wall of electricity that hits 10 times! This assist is fantastic in neutral, pressuring foes, and for extending blockstrings.
Dante is also part of the strongest team in the game: Zero May Cry. This team features Zero from Mega Man X as the Zero. Dante as the May. And Dante’s brother Vergil as the Cry. ZMC is a team built around hyper offense and killing the opponent before they can do anything. The idea is that you use Zero and his Sougenmu Super and Raikousen Special move to shred your opponents’ health. Dante and Vergil come in as assists to help Zero with the murdering. Dante’s Jam Session assist helps Zero get mixups on incoming opponents, while Vergil’s Rapid Slash assist helps Zero extend his Lightning Loops with Raikousen.
Regardless of that, Dante is still far and away the coolest character in this game. Being a near perfect recreation of playing DMC in a fighting game, you owe it to yourself to at least try playing around with Dante in the lab if you get a chance.
Azula (Avatar Legends)
Image Credit: PM Studios, Paramount Games
Avatar Legends is the most recent fighting game I’m going to talk about today. Much like MVC3, this game is absolutely insane. And also like MVC3, it feels like the developers cared a lot about the source material that they were pulling from. As a kid who grew up in the 2000s, I’m unfortunately obligated to say that I loved Avatar when I was growing up. This was the first show I watched that wasn’t episodic, and seeing what adventures the Gaang would go on every week was always exciting. The show wasn’t afraid to focus on serious topics, and treated the younger audience very maturely.
I never really had that much of an attachment to Azula as a character. I think that she’s a great parallel to Zuko, and is frequently shown to be a massive threat to Team Avatar (along with her helpers, Mai and Ty Lee). But when I saw what the folks behind Avatar Legends were doing with Azula in this game, I knew that she was a day 1 pick for me.
Azula is a stance character, meaning that her moves and attack properties change when she enters her stance. Her two stances are Focused and Firelord. Focused Azula is a character that’s more based on setting traps and performing some brutal just-frame combos. Meanwhile Firelord Azula is pure rushdown and aggression, trading her setup and just-frames for unga and/or bunga.
One of the main mechanics of Avatar Legends is the support character that you pick before a match begins. Each character has three supports to choose from. These will enhance something about your character, giving them more options, or changing how they play. Azula’s supports are Joo Dee, who lets her stay in Focused Stance. Her mother, Ursa, who let’s her stay in Firelord Stance. Finally, Lo and Li, who double the duration of Azula’s traps, AND gives her the unique property of changing Stances between matches.
With Lo and Li as your support, Azula will start the match in her Focused Stance. However if you lose a round, Azula snaps and enters her Firelord Stance. I think that this is such a cool and different way to do a Stance character, and Azula is the perfect character to experiment with an idea like this. When Azula is first introduced in Avatar, she’s calm, cold, and calculating. She has an air of authority that Zuko never really had. But during the last season, as she starts to lose that command, as well as Mai and Ty Lee, Azula starts to go a little crazy.
Fun lore aside, Azula is also a beast on the gameplay front. Her main gimmick is that she has these fire traps that can be ignited from her Special moves. By igniting these traps, it sets the ground on fire dealing damage over time. This flame carpet effect has been done in other games. Characters like Dormammu in MVC3 and Percival in Granblue VS Rising have it in their kits as well. But for Percival, it takes a resource, and for Dormammu, it’s not really that great. Azula meanwhile can just do this for free, and it’s basically essential to her gameplay. And a lot of her most basic combos end with her setting a trap on the ground.
Much like Dante, Azula is a character with an enormous skill ceiling, especially if you choose to play her in Focused Stance, or use both her stances with Lo and Li. She’s a top tier pick among a roster of top tier threats. And she’s voiced by Suzie Yeung, which makes her even better!
Yuzuriha (BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle)
Image Credit: French Bread, Arc System Works
And now for the part of the article where my bias takes over. I strongly believe that if I didn’t get super into BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle during the 2020 Pandemic, I would not be as into fighting games as I am now. One of the huge selling points for me was the crossover aspect of the game. You should know from these articles that I love the Persona games, and when BBTag came out, I had recently gotten into RWBY. I didn’t know anything about BlazBlue or Under Night.
For those who don’t know, BBTag is a 2v2 team fighting game. Meaning that I needed to learn how to play two characters. I knew immediately that I wanted to play as Narukami (the P4 protagonist) but my second slot was still a mystery. I tried a few different characters from P4 and RWBY, but none of them felt right. I liked playing as Weiss, and I felt like she synergized nicely with Narukami. But then I went to the UNI section of the character select, and my life changed forever.
I’ve always said that in order to find the fun in a fighting game, you need that one character that speaks to you. For me, Yuzuriha is that character. Hailing from Under Night In-Birth, Yuzu is an odachi wielding, shrine maiden samurai who fights with iaido quickdraw slashes, teleports, and elbow drops!
Yuzu is a hybrid Zoner and Mixup character with a little dollop of Stance for good measure. Yuzu’s gameplan revolves around her using her giant Normals and quickdraw Special moves to play keepaway with the opponent. Playing Yuzu is the equivalent to playing as a sniper. You’re not going to get far by just spraying and praying. You need to take calculated strikes with your quickdraws.
And here to help Yuzu’s sniping is her unique stance known as Mighty Qi. This is a stance that Yuzu can enter after holding the attack button at the end of certain moves such as her 5BBB, 2BBB, or j.BBB auto-combos, her 236x Specials, and her Rapid Slash Super. While she’s in this stance, Yuzu’s quickdraw attacks will become vastly improved. As an example, her quickdraw Special moves go from 22 frames of startup to 9! And if you land her triple slash with her 236 quickdraws, she’ll do a follow-up move called Successive Bloom.
But easily the best property of Mighty Qi is that while Yuzu is stationary, she will automatically sidestep anything that has a projectile attribute! Yes, you read that right. Yuzu is a zoner with anti-zoner tech built into her kit. And when I say any projectile move, I mean any projectile. This includes Normals like Yukiko’s fans or Aigis’s bullets, Specials like Vatista’s orbs and Adachi’s fuck-ass Ziodyne laser beam, and Supers like Hilda’s Nail Torrent and Chie’s Agniastra.
Yuzu is one of my most loved characters of all time. Even without knowing anything about her lore from her home game, I would still place her among my top twenty most important characters in my life. Her brand of flashy and stylish gameplay is what brought me back to the genre, and for that I’m forever grateful. And she’s voiced by Erica Lindbeck, which makes her even better!
Junpei Iori (Persona 4 Arena Ultimax)
Image Credit: Arc System Works
If it isn’t clear by now, not all characters in fighting games are created equally. Characters like Dante are super flashy and are hard to become exceptionally good with, all for damage that’s outclassed by much easier characters like Vergil. Because of how radically different Azula’s two stances are, you can just opt to play Firelord Stance and never bother with the high execution of Focused Stance, completely ignoring an entire half of the character. And while I love Yuzu to pieces, and she’s very strong, she’s far from the strongest character in BBTag thanks to having losing matchups against the top tier characters like Ruby, Susano’o, Yumi, and Adachi. So what would happen if you took a mediocre character and made them play a minigame to become decent?
I have a question for you all. Do you like baseball?
Taking place after the main story of Persona 3, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax shows us what the members of S.E.E.S are up to now that they’re adults who don’t spend their time tangoing with Shadows anymore. Yukari became an actress on Phoenix Ranger. Akihiko became an underground boxer. Mitsuru is still the head of the Kirijo group. And Junpei became the coach of a little league baseball team and dreams about going pro.
Almost every character in P4AU has their own gimmick to set them apart. Akihiko has his Cyclone Meter which powers up his attacks the longer his combos go on for. Naoto has a Doom counter on her opponents that starts at 13, and when it hits zero, she can insta-kill them with her Specials. And Junpei gets to play baseball.
Buckle in, because this is going to be a lot. So, Junpei’s power-up mechanic is his Baseball meter. The idea is that you want to score 10 runs. Once you do that, Junpei will enter a permanent install state called Victory Cry. While in Victory Cry, Junpei gets a flat 20% damage increase, attacks involving his bat now have a sweet spot for more damage, and his health and SP slowly recover over time. This install also carries over between rounds, so you don’t need to worry about having to unlock it again. But that begs the question. How do you get Runs?
In order to get Runs, you have to get runners on base. No duh. How do you do that? Just by hitting the opponent with your bat. Each hit with the bat will put a runner on base. So if you have a 3-hit bat combo, you just put 3 runners on base. As you hit the opponent and bring in runners, you’ll score Runs, capping at 55. You can also put a runner on base by deflecting a projectile with Junpei’s bat. He also has his Inferno Homer Super, which acts as a Home Run and clears the bases. It’s a fantastic combo ender, and a great way to quickly build up runs. But then you also have your Balls, Strikes, and Outs.
You get Balls by hitting a blocking opponent, hitting their Persona (or Koromaru if you’re fighting Ken), or by clashing attacks with the opponent. Getting 4 Balls will put a runner on base and reset the count. Strikes are accumulated every time you whiff a bat attack. 3 Strikes equate to one Out. And if you get 3 Outs, all of Junpei’s Baseball Meter (except for Runs) are cleared. You also get Outs by getting thrown, or by getting hit. Though thankfully it only counts the first hit as an Out, and not the entire combo.
So given that it took three whole paragraphs to explain Junpei’s unique mechanic, he must be the greatest character in the game, right? Right? Sadly… no. Believe it or not, despite Junpei’s insanely convoluted power-up mechanic, he’s considered to be an honest character in this game. And being the honest character in a roster of killers sadly doesn’t get you very far. Junpei just doesn’t have the same level of bologna that characters like Shadow Mitsuru, Yukari, or Shadow Chie have. Friendly reminder, Naoto has a mechanic where she can just kill you off of high-low mix. Junpei and his baseball bat really can’t compete with that.
But at the same time, I have to admire the sheer amount of effort that went into creating this character. I’ve never thought about the possibility of using a baseball player as the basis for a fighting game character, but what ArcSys cooked up with this character is honestly incredible, and it fits Junpei so well.
And if you thought that Junpei’s Baseball meter was wild, wait until you learn about Rise and her Rhythm Game Super.
CLOSING
And there you have it. Four of the coolest fighting game characters. Keep in mind that this list could’ve easily been expanded, and there were plenty of characters that I had to cut to keep the length of this one down. I would love to do a sequel to this at some point. Or maybe talk about anti-hype characters in fighting games. That’d be fun, and I already have a couple of punching bags in mind for that topic.