Everyone talks about Street Fighter or Tekken, but let's hear it for the weirder, unique, underrated, or forgotten fighting games out there.
My favorite is a Gundam game. Federation Vs. Zeon and it's sequel, Gundam vs Zeta Gundam, made by Capcom. The original games in the Gundam Versus franchise of games. imo the series was at it's best when it was handled by Capcom.
i really liked Bushido Blade ( Playstation 1 - 1998 ). We were broke fools, so we only ever rented it, but it was unique in that fights were over often within a few seconds. Most (99.9%) blade hits to the torso or head were instantly fatal. Like, lights out, you're slumping to the ground. Hits to limbs would permanently disable them (limping leg, much slower movement, one arm is useless drastically reducing moveset). If both legs were disabled, you had to crawl. You could still win, because a well timed shot to the torso was fatal. It made it so every single fight always had that anxious intensity of a fight in a normal fighting game where both players' health bars were almost gone.
the fighting arenas were very large and one could run quite a distance away (like literally turn away from the fight, sheath your weapon and run), climb up on stuff, go up/down stairs, run into a bamboo thicket, turn off axis, etc. you could also pick between whatever weapon you wanted, katana, spear, other shit i don't know, etc.
you could also do cheap shit, like reach down grab sand/dirt/dust, and fling it at your opponent's face. if you chose a certain weapon (katana + some smaller blade) you could throw the small blade at your opponent from a decent distance and totally kill them in that one shot if they didn't block correctly. i was a huge fan of that one, personally.
the graphics were tragically blocky, though "ok" for the time and the story was incomprehensible as far as i recall. but as a fighting game, it was pretty excellent. i mean, it felt very real to run into some bushes and suddenly throw sand at your pursuer before fatally stabbing them in the throat in that split second where they are distracted.
or like, you made a bad block and now you're crawling on the ground as your attacker advances, but you manage to slice their belly with a timed wild swing and kill them when they come in to finish you off.
some people hated the one-hit kill aspect of it, but my friends and i thought it was amazing compared to the endless ocean of health bar bullshit and strings of repeated 18 hit acrobatic mega combos to wear down opponents.
That sounds really cool
it was. if someone took same that idea and updated it with more complex fighting locations (like furniture you could vault over or kick at/trip over) and that kind of thing, not to mention better graphics and damage complexity (bleeding out maybe?), that would be a really unique and exciting fighter.
like as funny as it was to lean down for a quick sand throw, if your enemy was ready for it they could lunge in and quick thrust their blade into your face right when you were about to fling it, which was even more hilarious.
I still play Bushido Blade to this day, it's fun as fuck.
Kengo: Master of Bushido for PS2 was kind of similar