LogFAQs > #986500061

10. Vanessa (King of Fighters)
A female boxer fighting game character that wants to be up in the opponents face at all times? Thats unique, a good start. Shes well past her teenage years and tall, with messy and short red hair? Also fairly unique, and definitely pretty. The costume design is sleek and elegant without being dull, but also alluring without being overly revealing? Damn, were doing good. Fun personality with some great quotes and interactions, despite never being too relevant to the story? Shes got those, too! Vanessa hits pretty much all of my buttons and feels like an incredibly underappreciated character in fighting game history - shes basically a more fun version of C. Viper in many ways, if you ask me, and everyone seems to like Viper. Shed be even higher on this list if she wasnt another SNK character that I just havent personally played a ton.

9. Faust (Guilty Gear)
The lone character on the ranking that Ive never tried to play seriously at all, Faust is so obviously awesome as a fighting game character concept that it's impossible not to include him anyway. Everything he does in battle is outrageous and wonderfully inspired; you can just tell how much fun the animators have making Faust's moves come to life. Underneath all that, though, is an incredibly dark and sinister backstory, and when you wrap it all together, you've got a character that embodies everything I love about fighting games. Ridiculous, but still threatening. He'll make you laugh and recoil in horror in equal measure. It's the kind of roster member that only Guilty Gear could pull off without having it come off like too much of a joke. Again, my experience with him is almost exclusively as an observer, but that alone is so much damn fun that he always sticks out in my mind.

8. Lee (Tekken)
My first Tekken game was the 4th entry, so I actually knew this character as Violet before I knew him as Lee, and he was the first fighter I really gravitated to before I settled on one that I'll get to shortly. Lee's archetype isn't one I normally love, but it works well for me in Tekken due to how much it stands out. He's aggressively showy to the point of dorkiness in a sea of angry people who take themselves very seriously, especially others that are Mishima-adjacent, and I appreciate how he responds to his misfortunes by deciding the best revenge is living well when everyone else is so committed to the best revenge being revenge. His fighting style is, well, stylish and flashy, and he's gotten great development as the franchise has progressed that's made him one of the more consistently enjoyable story characters. Levity and pizzazz is a good combo here, lots to like.

7. Hilde (Soulcalibur)
Namco is very obviously proud of putting an attractive lady into the Soul series without ever giving her a costume thats the least bit revealing (even in damaged states), but, well I think they do deserve some credit. The prevalent oversexualization of female characters in fighting games doesnt necessarily *bother* me, per se, but as you can probably tell by the ladies represented on this ranking, I do love seeing that trend bucked, and Hildes design has been consistently fantastic since her debut. Might be my very favorite female design in the genre. Shes always been fun to play, too, even considering Ive never been particularly adept at piloting her, since her charge mechanics stand out in Soulcalibur. Yeah, she broke SC4 a little, but thats far enough in the past now to be funny. Personality-wise, shes a little boring, even if I like her role in the franchise lore, but her strong points are enough to outweigh that.

6. Yang (Street Fighter)
I'd say I have a knack for picking SF mains that make people mad, but that pretty much describes all of them at one point or another, doesn't it? At least I've never been a Yun player! I can't speak much to his SF3 version, but I got more satisfaction out of playing or watching good Yang rounds in SF4 than any other character on that excellent roster. You had to do a lot of work to be successful with him, but once he got rolling, he was hard to stop. Heaven help you if you end up in the corner against a decent Yang with all the options available to him. Plus, getting a good read on an opponent's projectile and rolling under it with Ultra 2 was always amazing. He's tricky, he's toolsy, his design is cool, and there aren't many fighting game moves that feel more sweet and smooth than the Mantis Slashes. I like Jamie fine as the new-era take on the Dragon Twins and even mained him in SF6 Season 1, but he can't touch the genuine article.