Preamble
These were the criteria I was given to rate characters by.
- How well does this character speak of the game's ideas?
- Can you simply watch this character and tell what this game wants to achieve in terms of flow, speed, neutral, etc?
- How does it interact with the system mechanics and other characters?
- Can this character apply the system mechanics like no other, show them off in their simplest form, or actively defy them in an interesting way?
- How creative is this character in terms of gameplay design?
- Does it bring something to the table that no other character in a game does?
- How "different" is it, and does it accomplish this while still "playing the same game as everyone else"?
Tier List View
for those who hate nuance
Why do I feel the way I do
Faust
Generally, I would call myself a fan of Faust, but I don't think his +R design is as good as other games.
The shell of Faust has not changed between 1998 and 2022. He has pretty much the same normals and most of the same specials as he always had, but also you don't think of any of those. If you think about Faust you think about items, and without a doubt they are the defining part of his kit—or they should be.
And that's where my problem with ACPR Faust comes in. His items lack interest. There's pretty much 3 categories of items:
- Food
- You're fucked on the ground
- You're fucked in the air
and sometimes an item is both of those bottom two at the same time. Faust is a funny character, and yet his items in ACPR aren't very funny at all, and are brutally effective and also paradoxically not necessary to succeed. Faust can play a shockingly clean game without using items because his normals and conventional specials are just so effective. This lets you de-emphasize the thing that makes the character unique. But even when you do use the items, they are less fun than the Xrd items. XRD has stupid funny items like black hole, oil drum can, and jump pad which introduce chaos for both players at the same time. That's not even mentioning the items that exist just to be funny like helium. All in all, he's faust, but with the least cool items.
Johnny
Johnny is an extremely well designed character. He both obeys the system mechanics and breaks the standards in interesting ways.
He has a unique character mechanic, but that mechanic doesn't centralize his character. You can blow your coins by using them just for their projectile properties, and it's a valid choice; but at the same time you can use coins as an investment to bolster your offense outside of the immediate engagement. He has enough coins that he doesn't need to strictly manage the resource, but few enough that he can't just chuck them like they're nothing. Even then, leveling up with coins isn't a linear increase. In Xrd, you route for level 3 mist finer and then dab on kids. With +R Johnny, level 2 is the go-to level, and level 3 is a niche option since it drastically changes how mist finer works, but it's still not bad.
His non-standard movement is also surprisingly well done. The step dash takes a lot of spatial awareness to master, but it is also shown to be very strong by movement wizards like Suzume and Satou. The way it interplays with his pressure and FD is very pleasing to me, because it's just simple, emergent play instead of a complex system of defined rules.
Order-Sol
I see HoS as a fan service character for Missing Link fans. He does an admirable job of refining ML's charge system and showcases the potential that the mechanic had.
Sadly, HoS also showcases the shortcomings of the charge system, and makes it pretty easy to see why the mechanic never came back in gear, or most other fighting games either—the closes being 
Tsubaki who handles the level system even worse and is a very linear character.
Similar to Johnny's levels, charge isn't a strictly linear improvement at each increased level, which is cool, but it's also a lot more demanding to manage. HoS needs to charge and action charge proactively to build levels, and then needs to retain his charge by adding D inputs to his specials to avoid blowing the load early, and then repeat the process every time he uses his charge. Since charge is a guage as opposed to a straight number increment, HoS' leveling up doesn't feel as snappy and clean as it could be.
From there, I think there's just no good reason for HoS to not have a conventional anti-air. Gutting a character's anti-air options is one of the least interesting ways to balance them, and Arcsys knows this now. If a character doesn't get an anti-air 6P, the character gets an strong anti-air close slash or 2S to fill the gap. HoS doesn't have that, and to spit in your face he has the first half of normal Sol's godlike 5K.
Sol
As much as I like to complain about Sol and Sol players, he does do a good job of embodying the sprit of ACPR.
The first thing is that Sol is fast, but not incomprehensibly fast. A spectator with solid knowledge of FGs can look at sol and grasp what's going on, even though it's happening in a small span of time. Along the way, he has a lot of moves, and a lot of those moves are kinda funny. I describe stuff like Riot Stamp and Grand Viper and Dragon Install as "why not" moves. Things the developers made simply because they thought it would be fun, and it obviously is for a lot of people with how many special-only Sols there are online.
If you asked me what the developer intent for this game was, I would probably say something stemming from those 2 aspects of Sol. A fast, intense game with a high power curve that isn't trying to be overwhelming or too tame at the same time, and wants to be fun.
That said, there's some mistakes in Sol's kit, I think. Grand Viper has no business being as good as it is. Yes it's risky, but if you get beyond the intermediate mindset of "I can get punished for this move" and use it as an intentional callout, it's ludicrously rewarding and can contest things in a completely unique way that is just frustrating for the other person. Grand Viper going under Johnny's sweep, Chipp's sweep, and Baiken's FB Tatami just makes the opponent feel cheated. I also think Sol doesn't deserve to have one of the best anti-airs in the game. I know I said gutting an anti-air is a lame way to balance characters, but also Sol's 5K is so insanely cracked that it makes Ky blush, and Ky is supposed to be the neutral focused shoto to Sol's rushdown! I wouldn't want Ken having better neutral than Ryu in SF6, and I don't like how good Sol's 5K is in its role here.