Cervantes: Complex with a large number of tools that give an advantage in numerous situations, but missing his just frames basically guarantees you get launch punished. Not beginner-friendly.
Ivy: Best I can tell you is that she kills step like none other with her horizontal whip attacks, but all her whip attacks are slow and fairly unsafe.
Mitsurugi: One of the simplest characters(very beginner friendly), but he's a major threat with his high damage mixups, ability to dish out more damage on downed foes, and decent reach. On the downside, he's probably the most well-studied character in the game so chances are when you play good players they'll already know everything you do about him and more. Oh, and due to his simplicity a lot of online scrubs will give you hatemail for using him at all. Best to ignore them :)
Yoshimitsu: Something like Cervantes, but with confusing stance shenanigans and stranger payoffs in my opinion. His lack of reach does hold him bac quite a bit, in spite of also using a katana his reach tends to be much less than Mitsurugi.
Xiba: Great reach, power, and borderline decent mixups, but he suffers against players that know his tricks due to being a bit unsafe(his strings are easy to deal with) and only really having one trick that causes difficulty for his foe.
Maxi: In spite of being favored by button mashers everywhere, he's a very difficult character to use properly whose strings are relatively easy to deal with by people familiar with him and you must rely on his stance mixups and pray for clean hits to remain competitive. He has seven different stances that he goes through as he attacks, though he doesn't have much of an execution barrier memorizing all of those and figuring out which to do when(rather than just automatically trying to combo everything you can) requires a lot of time and effort to really master.