Positional Advantage

tl;dr - Being above your opponent is better 90% of the time

Its a term I like to use as a way to describe advantage based only on the position of the players relative to each other. In most fighting games, an opponent having their back to the walls is advantage for the player, therefore a player has “Positional Advantage” over their opponents, if their opponent is in the corner.

This holds true in Arcana Heart as well. If you have your back to the wall…

You are unable to move backwards to avoid attacks, but your opponent is able to. Being in the corner removes and weakens defensive options
Some crossups can only convert to combos in the corner, and some are only possible in corner. Being in the corner makes you susceptible to stronger mixups
5[E] Guard Crushes are always full combos in the corner. Again, more mixups
Some characters have corner specific combos. Being in the corner increases the risk once you are hit

And possibly much more, being in the corner is just not a good place to be

However believe it or not, that particular situation is not the situation I wanted to cover. I want to talk about Height

If you have watched match videos of Arcana Heart 3, you will notice that players who know what they are doing, jump A LOT. To explain why people do this, we need to look at "Risk" and "Reward"

This is a great match to watch and learn from. For this topic, just give it a watch and notice how much height people are trying to get

In games like Street Fighter, jumping poses a much higher risk. As an example, if you jump

You lose the ability to change your direction and momentum until you land (Specials excluded, yes I know Ryu can use hurricane kick to float a little bit)
You lose the ability to block

With this positioning from both players, clarice is at a massive advantage

In Arcana Heart jumping and being airborne has MANY advantages over being grounded.

Anti-airs are pure poop in this game (except Minori 5B). There are VERY FEW actual good Anti airs in this game meaning the risk of getting beaten out of the air, when the opponent is grounded, is low, Lowering Risk
Being in the air removes the possibility of High/Low mixups and crossups are extremely hard to do on airborne opponents (Unless you are broken like Elsa). Being airborne removes mixup options from the opponent, Lowering Risk again
Air movement options are far better than ground movement options

On top of this, being above your opponent has a set of advantages as well

If you are above the opponent, if you approach the enemy and attack, you will be moving downwards. Since you are moving downwards, you can cancel the recovery and vulnerable portion of the attack into landing which has no recovery. Attacking while moving downwards is safer, if you reach the ground quickly
If you are below the opponent, since you must be rising or grounded to attack the opponent, you must bear the full brunt of the recovery of the attacks. Attacking while rising cannot cut recovery by landing
This is character specific but it is generally true. If you are above the opponent and you are moving downwards, if you do manage to hit them you can get much stronger combos. Normally re-jump combos or extend force combos. Successfully hitting an opponent on the way down, nets better rewards in most situations

If you are getting into Arcana Heart, for now it will be enough to just take away “Being above the opponent is advantageous”. You will eventually understand all of the points and “feel” them yourself. So jump and learn

There will be a point where simply hopping everywhere will no longer suffice and that will be much, much later

tl;dr – jumping is winning