All Gakuran Fighting Styles and How Each One Plays

This is a showcase of every fighting style in Gakuran, not a tier list. The goal here is to lay out what each of the eight styles actually does — the M1 strings, the heavy attacks, and the passive perks — so you know what you’re picking before you roll it. Keep in mind that how strong a style feels also depends on your height and build, your spacing, your parrying, and your movement, so the “best” style is rarely just the one with the biggest numbers.

Every fighting style in the Gakuran showcase

All eight show up in the same showcase, from the common Basic style up through the legendary Capoeira and Wrestling. The rest of this guide walks each one’s perks and move feel, then covers the controls so you can test them yourself.

Full move and perk breakdown for all eight styles

How each Gakuran fighting style plays

Here’s what each style feels like once you’re actually trading hits, one at a time.

Basic

Basic is the common starting style and the yardstick for the rest. Its M1 string and heavy are unremarkable on purpose, but the passives are quietly useful — Counter Strike rewards a clean perfect block with +5% on your next hit, and Swift Recovery keeps your posture topped up. It’s a perfectly playable style while you learn spacing and parries.

Slugger

Slugger is slow, heavy-hitting pressure. Both the M1s and the heavy come out lazily, so you won’t win a speed race, but every landed hit hurts — and Unstable pushes that further, adding 10% to your damage at the cost of taking 20% more yourself. It’s a high-risk, high-reward style that punishes hard when your reads are right and gets punished just as hard when they’re not.

Muay Thai

Muay Thai is fast striking backed by ragdoll M2s. The M1s snap out as knees and elbows, so the string is quick and hard to parry on reaction, and the heavy caps it with a kick. With Crushing Force chipping posture and a high grapple-clash chance, it’s built to keep an opponent pinned and off balance.

Karate

Karate mixes kicks and punches into a clean, balanced string with a head-kick heavy. Its edge is sustain: Steady Nerves boosts posture regen after a perfect block, and Balanced Strike refunds 25% posture every time you land an M2. That makes it a resilient, methodical style that rewards defense.

Boxing

Boxing is the first of the epics and it’s all about safe, committal heavies. Untouchable makes you uninterruptible after your M2s, so once you commit to the uppercut you’re seeing it through, and Perfect Reflex shaves a full second off your current M2 cooldown every time you land a perfect block. Chain those perfect blocks and your heavy is almost always available — that cooldown value is a big part of why Boxing gets called so strong on shorter, faster builds.

Hakari

Hakari (also written as Hikari in some rosters) is fast striking with ragdoll M2s and a huge payoff attached. Land a full M1 combo without getting stunned and Momentum Rush opens a 7-second window where your M2 deals 3x damage — its heavy even has a dedicated momentum-rush version. The whole style is about connecting the string cleanly, then cashing it in.

Capoeira

Capoeira is the legendary mobility style. The M1s are very fast and almost entirely kicks, the heavy is a flashy spinning handstand kick, and its M2 ragdolls whatever it touches. The standout perk is a passive that cuts your dash cooldown by 25%, so you can weave in and out of range far more often than most styles — spacing and flash are the whole point here.

Wrestling

Wrestling closes out the legendaries and plays the opposite of Capoeira. Its M1s are slow, so you’re not winning the poke game, but the payoff is the Takedown M2 — a grab that slams the opponent into the ground for 1.5x damage. Back that with Heavy Hit III guard break on every attack and a 55% grapple-clash chance, and it becomes grinding, grab-heavy pressure.

Combat controls for testing the styles

Picking a style for your build

Your height and build change which styles feel good long before the perks do. A baseline height sits at exactly 100 HP. Shorter characters deal less damage and have less health and range, but they also get smaller hitboxes and faster attacks — which is why close-range pressure styles like Boxing shine on short builds. Taller characters flip that trade: more range, more health, more damage, but bigger hitboxes and slower swings that are easier to punish.

That’s the real reason there’s no single “best” style. A tall Wrestling build and a short Boxing build both work; a fast striker like Hakari or Muay Thai rewards a player who lands clean combos. But any of them falls apart if you ignore the fundamentals — parry timing on F, dash spacing on Q, and not throwing predictable strings. Match the style to your build, then let your mechanics carry it.

Mistakes that make a style feel worse than it is

Most “this style is bad” complaints trace back to the same handful of habits. The first is forgetting to press T and wondering why nothing lands. The second is spamming M1 with no spacing — a predictable string is free food for a parry, no matter how strong the style.

From there it’s ignoring your dash and spacing entirely, then blaming the style instead of the mechanics underneath it. And finally, treating a tier list as permanent fact — rankings are opinions that shift with every balance patch, so a style that looks weak on a list can be perfectly strong in your hands.

Where to go next

Once you’ve picked a style, the natural next step is a full fighting style tier list with recommended builds for short versus tall characters, and a best height/build breakdown for whichever style you landed on — Boxing and Hakari being the usual first stops.

If you’re new to the combat itself, look into beginner PvP controls and dedicated parry practice to sharpen your F timing. And if you want to keep rerolling toward a specific style, guides on farming reroll resources and codes plus the active PvP spots around the school and town will keep you busy.

Video help