I know I generally like characters who are more defensive by nature. I generally like characters who can kind of use your momentum against you. For this reason, I use to use Baiken in Guilty Gear. In SF, I’m a traditional Dhalsim/Guile player (though I use mainly Guile in SFIV). My basic strategy is to force you to beat yourself. In SF it generally means I just play defensive, staying out of ranges where I can’t be punished (and you can), and frustrating my opponent until they start to get desperate and start taking huge risk. My main goal is “offense elimination”, basically giving an opponent no real opportunity to mount any sort of offense, and any attempt to do so, I ideally want it to work against them. A lot of people when playing me have stated that when I beat them it feels as if they beat themselves.
I pretty much formed my playstyle around what I read about Aikido. Aikido, I believe is the philosophy of using your opponent’s energy against them.
For me, it all depends on the game. I’m open to anything as long as I can naturally play that character better than the others. In Tekken 6, I play King, a grappler, because how he plays seems to feel better than the other characters. For SFIV, I play Vega, a link-heavy mobility character with good pokes. SCV, it’s Raphael, a lower damage character with lots of dodge moves and stance mixups. In every SF, I’ll probably pick charge characters, because I like how they work in comparison to other Fighters like KoF.
I typically lean toward the characters with lots of ways to dodge or beat other moves, and possibly with a stance or two if it’s a 3D fighter, but the overall game’s system determines which character I choose.
My “philosophy,” if you can call it that, is to be a self-described “bitch-ass turtle.” Blocking a lot, making use of normals to control space, and generally waiting for the right time to shift momentum.
Where my style differs from a lot of defensive minded players, is I will typically (though not always) employ this strategy with a rushdown character. I sort of have this mentality, blocking will always be good, no matter what character you pick, and I can find good normals to make use of on defense, but on offense, the defensive stalwarts are usually pretty gimped. When my time comes, I want a character with the comboability to make good use of it, or the offensive horses to maintain momentum. If the match gets reset to neutral, I back off, wait for you to come to me, and start the process over.
I like your Akido philosphy Branh, in fact I generally use that philosophy whenever my opponent plays a good offense. My philosophy is play a good offense mixed up with shenanigans because it’s fun and I always believe a good offense make a good defense.
Find the most powerful character in the game and exploit them till people figure out how to deal with them.
Then Move on to the next character. Rinse and Repeat till I have found the most powerful character in a given game.
Play to Win.
And if someone tells me “Winning isn’t everything. I play to have fun” or something along the lines of that I just reply with “But winning is fun” and they usually can’t come up with a counter argument.