In my honest opinion, F2P models ruin a lot of the games they're in by virtue of interfering with game mechanics/balance in order to get money out of people. And the worst thing is, it doesn't become balanced if you pay some money, it stays broken so you pay more. TF2 is about the only F2P game I've seen that does it rather well, and that's only because Valve don't entirely care about any profits made from selling it anymore, most of it's from hats, which are arbitrary. But if a fighting game gives you one, singular character, and expects you to buy the rest, that's stupid. It's not even the obvious things though. They could just make one of the more powerful characters paid instead of free (although in this case that's almost certain), or give you a limited range of combat styles (also certain - really, one character is just so stupid for a fighting game. I don't even).
I'm generally more of a "Don't knock it 'till you try it" sort of person, but that's an incredibly dubious setup. Double Helix, known mainly for terrible games, and Rare, a husk of the studio that people liked, which made Kinect Sports recently, team up to make a free-to-play fighter in which only one character is initially available.
