Archetype

Archetypes in Tekken are not as strict as in other fighting games. Every character has roughly the same game plan. This is what's meant by people saying Tekken is more focused on the system than the characters. Thus, it's hard to fit characters neatly into a box like grappler, rushdown, zoner, etc.

On the wiki

On Wavu Wiki, characters' archetypes are defined by how their moves suit key roles in the Tekken system. These are:

Poke

Strength of fast, safe moves.

Mixup

Strength of mid/low mixups (or other mixups that beat guard). Considers both ease of enforcing and expected payoff.

Keepout

Strength of big neutral buttons.

Whiff punish

Strength of whiff punishers (consider: speed, complexity of input, reward, range, hit level, and safety).

Okizeme

Strength of ground hitting moves and tech traps. Considers also the chance of getting an opponent into such situations and how tricky they are.

Pressure

Strength of buttons to use in pressure when plus. Best moves here are things like Lidia df+2 which shuts down many defensive options while also applying a mixup.

Defense

Strength of buttons to use in pressure when minus. Think evasive moves, parries, powercrushes, or just strong fast buttons (e.g. good magic fours). Movement is a significant factor here, i.e. how good their backdash and sidestep are.

Tricky

How much cheese the character has. How difficult it is to defend accurately against the character.

Radar graphs

The radar graphs on each character's overview page are generated from the data shown in User:RogerDodger/Archetypes. For each criteria, the characters are ranked in order and given a score based on the placement. If you think a character is poorly placed, you can discuss on Template_talk:Archetype or on the Discord.

These scores are graphed; however the data is normalized so the average point is in the middle. This is done so the graphs don't come across as a power ranking, which is not its intention. Because of this there are some surprising graphs, such as Devil Jin having a low point on the graph for "tricky" even though he's quite tricky. The graph shows that even though he's good at it, it's also his weakest aspect.