It's hard to list favourite characters. I'm gonna go list the ones that have been the most impactful to me from a ryona perspective. In no particular order.
1-2) Maki and Lucia (Final Fight 2 and 3 resp.)
Final Fight 2 was the one I grew up with so I feel a closer connection to Maki than I do Lucia. I picture Lucia as very rough, tough and tomboy-ish, whereas I picture Maki to be more graceful, but more dangerous. The Final Fight formula is one that I like and has influenced my fantasy a lot. You have the hordes of physically inferior mooks followed by the physically superior boss fight. The girls need to find a way around the unfair numbers disadvantage and in the process will be weakened. They then have to finesse their way through the invincible boss fights.
3) Mai (Fatal Fury/King of Fighters)
Self explanatory. Big bust, lots of jiggle, small and skilled. Has lots of tools to topple a larger foe so even if her opponent is physically dominant, there's still a lot of tension and uncertainty in the fight. I remember playing a survival mode where I basically had to fight off infinite number of enemies and see how far I got. I just loved the inevitability of losing, no matter how absurdly skilled Mai was (I'm dreadful at fighting games, so I need to set it on an easier difficulty to give me the illusion that Mai kicks ass).
4-5) Black Orchid and Maya (Killer Instinct)
I wasn't the type to read up on fighting game stories as a kid, so I often just made it up. To me, these two girls were outmatched. They were just above average humans fighting against killer robots and skeletons. Having normal girls try to hold their own against the supernatural was really cool to me. Yes I know B Orchid turns into a panther and these girls do crazy stuff. In my fantasies, they did none of that
6) Tiffany (Rival Schools)
Rival Schools is not exactly an original concept. You have a bunch of schools entering some sort of fighting tournament (I think) and fighting each other. Of course, in anime fashion, you have themed schools like the sports school, the American school, the punk school etc. Tiffany was the cheerleader for the American school. (Blonde pretty boy, cheerleader, intimidating black dude. I think they have all of the anime American stereotypes covered...) This was really the first time I experienced this concept in the form of a video game. The appealing thing is that since it was school vs school, I would imagine some of the girls that I had a crush on (when I was in middle/high school) fighting some of these schools and getting their ass kicked
7) Vallah (War Gods)
Completely dreadful game about a bunch of Gods fighting each other. However, I remember loving this cheat code that allowed me to modify damage taken by each player. I basically modified it so that the AI would take almost no damage. I would imagine Vallah had her God status stripped away and was the one mortal fighting against the Gods. Human vs immortal, wonder how that fight will end up.
That's all I can think of as far as games that influenced my ryona fantasies. Strangely enough, Chun Li didn't really do it for me. I guess just fill the 8-10 slots with WWE games, as I loved doing things like handicap matches and royal rumbles
