I haven't used Akiko in a while but she used to be a main so maybe I can answer a few things. I'm definitely not an expert so if I'm blatantly wrong on something, someone please point it out >_<
The good:
- she has some excellent normals. j.B, j.C, and far 5b all have good range and fairly good priority, and means that she's good with anti-air or air to air fighting, and can often combo off of such counter hits.
- very powerful corner combo. With a blue IC she can get around 6k damage fairly regularly with her corner knife loop, and she can use variants of this loop from her j.B or 5b counter hits.
- her FM is fairly easy to land. As long as the opponent is on the floor and outside a corner, it'll hit. There are also ways to pressure the opponent so that the FM is guaranteed.
- The fire extinguisher move can be safely used on basically any knockdown, and is quite effective against characters that use their RF bar a lot (ie Mio and Mai). It's also good cover for oki. This helps her keep initiative, once she gets it.
The bad:
- Very limited movelist compared to most characters, which means she has a limited playstyle. She DOES have mixups and setups like everyone else, but not as many.
- limited range on her ground normals, and her forward dash is a diagonal dash, which means she's almost always approaching an opponent from the air. This can be a good thing against some characters and a bad thing against others. It can get pretty predictable.
- The above two things means that she often has to be played defensively, as she has trouble making openings for herself out of nowhere against certain characters. Expect to RG a lot, because a lot of your damage is probably going to come from counterattacks.
- Her 623 move is slower than those of most other characters, is harder to get good damage out of, and is very punishable if it misses or is blocked.
- While powerful, her combo (I say one because her comboing pretty much revolves around modifying the same combo to suit your resources at the time) is tricky to do, as it requires precise timing, which varies depending on the character you're fighting. Some people are smaller than others, some fall faster, etc etc. The air combo to get into the corner is also very dependent on the same things, so that's also very easy to mess up on.
- While there ARE chances to use her supers, there aren't a lot of them. The car super can be used after any vacuum hit, but the damage scaling on the vacuum is very high. The time slow super is primarily used to mess up the opponent's pace as well as give you a chance to throw, and the finger poke super isn't too useful at all, except maybe as a wakeup move. This is why Akiko often has enough super bar to do her FM.
- Large size (she's one of the tallest characters) means she's easy to hit and easy to combo.
The ugly:
- I suppose Akiko's jam would look ugly to those who have tasted it.
Combos:
Her corner combo is something like this. With the opponent cornered, with a blue IC:
5b 5b 2c 22c <helps to walk forward here> (5b 5b 5c)x3 41236b <side change> 41236b <side change> 214a
the first 5b in the knife loop (5b 5b 5c) can be replaced with a 2a or a 5a, to adjust height, and I'm not totally sure about this, but replacing the first 5b with a 5a may take less juggle meter, which lets you repeat the loop one more time if you're short on that.
You can also follow up the vacuum with the car super, but the timing is tricky with that and as I said, the damage scaling is steep.
Her air combo mostly involves airdash cancelling jb until you start doing the knife loop and then it's the same from there. So something like:
5b 5b 2c 22c 5b jb <airdash on first hit> jb <land> 5b 5b 5c etc etc...
I'm not sure how to make her air combo longer and still be able to do the corner loop.
If you're short on juggle meter then of course you just do the loop less times before finishing it.
Misc things:
- 2c can be linked with any 623 move if you do it fast enough.
- EX vacuum can be linked with other EX vacuums until you run out of RF bar.
