ANerdzLife

Fighting games naturally have a cyclic life span. When most games come out, the hype around a new release is enough to push the game to the forefront of people’s minds. However, after a while the game naturally dies down as developer support winds down and the community moves on to other games.

As I was watching Combo Breaker 2025 this weekend, I had a moment of realization: there are an astonishing number of really great fighting games available right now, all with a lot of community and developer support behind them.

Let’s run down the games making waves in the FGC at the moment:

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves

MetaCritic: 80

Fatal Fury proper had been in hibernation for well over 20 years. The beloved SNK title had taken a back seat to SNK’s more inclusive series ‘The King of Fighters’ (think Smash, but for SNK series). But City of The Wolves released to incredible fanfare and has quickly become a top 3 fighting game, based on viewership and player base.

Tekken 8

MetaCritic: 90

Bandai Namco’s 2024 release continues to keep fans engaged with regular releases, hype ass trailers and key innovations in the combat that the fans have grown to love and support.

Guilty Gear: Strive

MetaCritic: 87

Guilty Gear was another series that had taken a back seat to the franchises like Street Fighter and Tekken…but fast forward to now and its not unusual to see Strive headlining an FGC tournament. Fantastic character design and what ArcSystems calls a ‘complete reconstruction of the franchise’…and you have yet another fantastic fighting game.

Street Fighter 6

MetaCritic: 92

What can you really say about Street Fighter? It remains the king of the FGC with yet another stellar release in Street Fighter 6. The drive gauge feature introduced in SF6 has once again reinvented the series in a way that allows for so much more player creativity on the battlefield. Street Fighter remains at the top with no end in sight.

The Capcom Fighting Collections

On top of all of these original releases…Capcom has been hitting the pavement with their series of fighting game collections they have been releasing the past couple years. The following all time classics have been re-released with modern online support and added new features to bring these classics back into the limelight.

-Marvel vs Capcom 1 & 2

-Capcom vs SNK 1 & 2

-Power Stone 1 & 2

-Street Fighter Alpha 3

-X-Men vs Street Fighter

-Project Justice

The Future:

There are also rumors swirling about an impending Injustice 3 rumor and it seems about time we see something new from the Soul Calibur series.

So jump in, and let me know which fighting games you’re loving or are the most looking forward to!