Universal Defense
Guarding
By holding the 
button, you can block incoming attacks, completely negating the damage of some and strongly reducing the damage of others, such as Ki Blasts and Blast 1/2s. Holding the will lock your character rotation, pressing 
or 
while guarding will change your guard stance to either a high or low guard, respectively, these alternate guard stances will defend against different types of attacks such as directional Smash Attacks or different Rushing Techniques.
Alignment
As explained here, ensuring that you're properly aligned with the opponent can greatly reduce damage taken, as allowing your opponent to attack you from behind will nearly always result in them dealing a higher amount of damage to you. The most basic way to realign is by tapping the button, however, you can align more effectively as detailed here.
Defensive Vanishing
Defensive Vanishing is one of the most useful methods of defense to master, as it can be done in many scenarios against many types of attacks, and completely avoids any damage regardless of type. This can be done by tapping right before an attack that can be vanished hits you, and for some attacks (mainly Blast or Explosive Wave type B2s) require multiple sequential vanishes to properly avoid all incoming damage.
Z-Countering
Z-Countering is a very precise defensive mechanic, and should also only be done conditionally, this can be done by pressing File:Square.png while holding on the exact frame a melee attack of any kind (excl. Blast 2s/Ultimate Blasts). If you successfully perform this technique, you'll vanish behind your opponent and hit them with a counter-attack that can be vanished, if they vanish this it will begin a string of vanishing back and forth between opponents, in which the first to fail or the one with the most Ki will lose the vanish string. If fail to vanish you'll be hit by the Z-Counter counter-attack which will lead into a Dragon Smash String. If you have less Ki an no one fails to vanish, you'll vanish a final time but will not counter-attack automatically, meaning you can manually attack them with a safe option such as Rush Attacks.
