Just wanted to post this somewhere for SF players new to KOF trying to find characters since I did this in XI and it really helped me out so far in XIII since I’m not feeling how most of my old characters play in this game.
I started fooling around with random select when I was bored in the arcade and before that I didn’t know that KOF random select reselects after every match, even in arcade mode and even if you pick rematch. So what I would do is pick two character I actually played and one character on random select.
If you play the random character on point and just try to learn a little about that character while trying to take a decent amount of life off the other person’s point character to make the fight manageable for your other two characters you can test out how you like the feel of each character in the roster without so much risk of losing (which is a bigger deal in an arcade than on console). It’s really bad in the beginning but once a character pops up for the 5th or 6th time you start to at least already know their normals and specials and have some sort of game plan in mind. If your random character starts doing more than their fair share of work you can bump it up to two or three random characters for fun or you can just add the character you like best to your team.
Disclaimer: XIII is a little more in depth than XI because of HD combos, so its a bit harder to try this, especially once you go beyond the point character.
Anyway I hope this helps someone find a character that really like that they might not have picked otherwise.