Hey everyone! New to fighting games would love some help with recommendations for a sf5 character

Been playing for a few weeks now and scratching my head over which character to play as currently none of the characters have really been working…

As a way of narrowing down a little I guess, some of the things I enjoy are more simple control characters who are complex in the way you can use those moves, love characters who punch and kick more than projectiles.

Also love Joke characters like Dan, though there doesn’t seem to be any in this game.

I understand that the first choice would be Ryu, though I’m having trouble with him only in Sf5 for some reason.

Also not a big fan of Balrog purely from a personality perspective, though he’s the closest gameplay wise to what I’m looking for…

Any ideas? Should I wait to see if season 2 brings anyone?

As a newbie to fighting games, I’m really wanting to start getting involved with the fighting community and really enjoy these types of games.

Cheers guys!

What do you mean by that?
If you mean that you can’t win with them, then the others won’t “work” either.
Big part of the fun in fighting games is making your character work.

And even though this is a topic that is allowed in the dojo and encouraged by the sticky, personally I feel like character suggestion threads are bullshit.
Honestly if there’s already so much indifference and lack of commitment in you towards the game, that you can’t decide upon a favorite character, what hope do you have on actually grinding out or researching anything else?

I try to help you and tell you what goes through my mind when I pick a fighting game character:

Does he look cool and would I want to be that guy?
If the answer is yes, I just picked my character and just roll with that shit, start researching and learning their combos and confirms and ask people questions here if I come across problems. Also finding out who the best players for these characters are and watching what they do to have a perspective on what their mindset and decision making is in a game vs. mine.
The worst that can happen is that I like two characters like Sol and Johnny in Xrd or Paul and Kazuya in Tekken. Then I usually pick one that I feel controls better.

If you’re a tier whore the decision is easy: Look up a tierlist and pick the one that’s on the top.

So just pick somebody you like for any reason and stick with it.
It takes you years to get good at these games anyways, so it’s a good idea to just stick to what you like and try to get better with it.
No matter what level you’re at just try to get better. So your character does not work? Look at what you do wrong and don’t do it anymore. Get outside perspectives by watching players a league or two above you and see what they are doing to win. Try that approach as well.
Just because you get duffed a lot doesn’t mean your character does not work, it just means that you didn’t put enough work into that character.

Ah, what I mean by that is I have trouble with the way they play on the controller. I use a D-pad, so some characters, often charge characters, have been hard to use. I don’t necessarily have an issue with wins or losses.

I understand what you mean though. I’ve only just joined, so I don’t know that stance of these kind of posts. That’s very harsh but true, however I want to learn this game, I enjoy it. I’m fully committed to learning a character! Though like I said, I’m new to fighting games, really don’t know much about matchups and the such.

I’ll get to work then, thanks for the advice.

Charge characters are in theory not that hard to play on pad.
In SFV they made the inputs very strict recently though, so that you don’t get accidental charge moves when you charge and walk forward to hit a button.
Just comes down to practice.

NuckleDu and ImStillDaDaddy, 2 of the best Guile players in the world, are also pad players, so that goes to show you that the sky is the limit even if you use pad.

And it’s completely ok to post these topics here, it’s just me who dislikes them, dunno how others feel.

Ryu. Seriously. The shoto is the archetype the game is designed around. You could pick Akuma or Ken, I suppose, but they have a bit of weird stuff on top of the usual shoto formula. Akuma obviously more so than Ken. If you learn to play a shoto, you learn how to play Street Fighter. Tier lists don’t mean anything at low levels of play, and honest karate man helps you learn the basics because he has it all and is mainly based around solid fundamentals. Once you have the basics of the game down, it will be easier to narrow down what you actually want out of a character so you don’t end up trying to grind a character you later realize doesn’t complement your playstyle.

Or you could just go for a character you like and grind it out. Don’t focus too much on results early on, because some characters have stuff that works well at low level play but is actually extremely punishable if a person knows what to do. Gief’s knee into SPD, for example. Try to focus on basic gameplay like poking, zoning and anti-airing rather than relying on gimmicks early on, which can lead to bad habits. It’s better to lose early on so you won’t have to spend weeks unlearning all the dumb shit you got easy wins with when you started out. Take it from me, it takes a really long time to stop doing random shit instinctively even when you know it’s going to lose you games. You don’t want to be one of those Akumas who throw fireballs and back jump themselves into the corner or the Balrogs who do full screen dash punches.

Laura is basically a slower Balrog with more mix-up potential. You might wanna try that. She’s really not hard execution wise and you can play her very simply or very complex.
Sadly all the other characters who are close to Balrog are charge characters, so if you can’t get around that you don’t have many options.

Oh awesome, had no idea that NuckleDu played pad… gives me a lot of hope actually! Means I don’t have to worry about switching to a stick to play well with charge characters. Just need to try and get used to it, find playing charge characters like Guile can give my hand cramps from too much play. Probably using the controls wrong but trying to do a flash kick, by quickly switching from holding down to quickly snapping to up, especially with the Ex version.

It’s fine about you disliking these kind of posts, I guess after a while they’d get pretty annoying. Thanks anyways!

Usually love going shoto’s! I really love playing Ryu in Marvel. So I don’t really understand why it is about street fighter 5 that’s the problem. Something it might be about being used to the controls for Ryu in Marvel being different to Sf5? I don’t know… I tend to try playing aggressively by accident, rather then taking it slow, though that ends up not going well.

Though I totally understand what you mean, I’ve picked up some nasty habits with putting out Ex moves randomly without much thought, because it catches being at my level off guard sometimes, got to try stopping doing that. I’ll keep trying with Ryu and see how it goes! Thanks so much! Really helps to hear that I’m not the only one who’s started off that way. Gives me some hope that I can figure it out! Cheers!

Sure, I’ll give Laura a try! I was a bit put of trying her knowing how powerful she is at the moment, and worrying I’d put people off! Haha silly I know, but yeah. She sounds pretty cool to me! Execution of moves is probably my biggest issue right now besides bad habits. Which is why I have problems with charge characters. So she might be the character that makes things a lot easier! Thanks for the help!

Looking forward to the next season character though, looks to be a boxing type character, who could end up being perfect for the style I was looking for. Just about waiting and seeing!

From personal experience, play Ryu for a little longer. When I started to get more serious about FGs, my first ‘real’ main was Decapre in USF4. That was a bad choice because I didn’t really learn the game, I just won with gimmicks until I hit a certain level. I finally gave Ryu a chance and it helped me understand what was really going on. I feel this is because of how straight forward he is. Average speed, average health, average normals, average execution, not too gimmicky, etc.

Until you get better, I would avoid these characters like the plague; Ibuki, Rashid, Laura (even though someone suggested her), Zangief, Vega, M. Bison, Akuma (solely based on his health), Dhalsim, Karin, Fang, Juri.

Hmm, that’s an interesting point! Had a lot of trouble with unlearning some bad habits from playing characters with gimmicks… tended to just throw them out with out thinking. So it makes sense how that could make learning the game harder, because you’re technically not learning just spamming buttons in order to get it to work.

It’s also interesting that you mentioned not to use Laura or Rashid, i’ve felt after playing them recently to be pretty simple execution wise. Guess they might make bad habits? May I ask why? If that’s okay?

I’ll stick with Ryu for now then, any other characters worth trying? Seems Alex, Ken, Birdie, Cammy and Guile are okay as well?

People will always tell you to play Ryu to learn SF, but the truth is that you’ll have less fun and you’ll therefore invest less effort in the game while playing a character that doesn’t fit your playstyle. I would’ve dropped fighting games a while ago if I followed the rule of only playing shotos until you git gud.
The truth is, every single character in the game requires to learn fundamentals in order to progress; you’ll need to learn spacing, zoning, anti-airing with Gief in the same way as you need it for Ryu. The idea that you’ll learn better just because your character is more “honest” is wrong; if anything, playing a “gimmicky” character will require you to be much smarter to win against better opponents because they will know very well how to blow up your tactics.
Also on a lower level literally every character is gimmicky. Cammy is considered to be one of the more honest characters in the game, yet in Bronze everyone will spam Spiral Arrows and Hooligans even if they’re all unsafe. Ryus will spam fireballs, Kens will spam shoryukens and heavy tatsus, Necallis will spam charge moves… and the list goes on.

Ultimately, play to learn, but also play to have fun. And you’ll have more fun with fun characters than with limited ones that are supposed to be better for that reason.

Good point… I’ll see about trying a few characters that I enjoy playing and go from there. Just don’t want to end up with bad habits created from playing a certain character, like with ryu for whatever reason, I keep trying to do the hadouken attack but always comes out with shoryuken, but only in SF5, I’m really not sure why that is…

Thanks for the advice!

There’s a pretty big input buffer in SF5 so you might get a shoryuken if you do a hadouken after you were walking forward.

Dunno how “average” his normals are in SFV.
I don’t see Ryu in SFV as the “SF Archetype”.

Play birdie or vega
These characters helped me develop fundamentals and a better understanding of the neutral faster than any of the other characters

Aha that might be the case, I’ll try stop myself from pressing forward while doing a hadouken, thanks! Always used to be the other way around in Marvel, wanting to a Shoryuken and getting a hadouken haha.

Yeah, I’ve been getting that feeling with Ryu in Sf5 specifically. Other characters seem so different to Ryu other than a few executions and such.

I’ve been playing quite a bit of birdie and having a lot of fun! He might end up my main character I focus on l, even though I have issues figuring his leaping chain move and command grab with the hair attack to be consistent.

Vega, I’m not sure about, he seems fun! But his play style is all over the place with the leaping, claws and grabs. Don’t know where to begin haha!

His walkspeed will get you up to speed on the footsies
I recommend him over Karin and cammy because he is the easier and more basic character of the fast walk speeds
both of these characters together helped me learn the basics pretty fast

Ooh I see what you mean about the speed of Vega, totally agree that he’s really a great character for doing footsies, if I stick to the basics with him, rather than trying to go crazy with his leaps and such. Might learn a lot.

Cheers for the information and help!

I like these characters to learn with as well, they are good choices.