Ordinary Gamer wrote:I lost interest in fighters years ago mostly because the genre seems to exclusively target competitive gamers now. It's all about ranked matches online and real life tournaments. These companies don't care about people who mostly play games for the single player experience. It's basically a tournament genre. I stopped caring once I realized that I was no longer the target audience.
May depend on which you play, as I'd contend that many Arc System Works and NetherRealm Studios releases (at least) include substantial single player oriented content. Others, such as
Killer Instinct, do as well, albeit tainted by microtransactions. Including online play and so on is fairly logical though,as PVP/tournaments have been a not-insignificant part of fighters since SF2. Frequent reliance on DLC, on the other hand, is what started to get to me, even if it's also pretty logical to some degree.
That said, my fighting game play definitely peaked around college, as many evenings were spent passing controllers around on versus modes. So for me...
Capcom vs SNK 2 First one was good too, but this was a mainstay for my apartment for a while, letting us have a little of everything with the balance system and all that...but still be kinda grounded.
Marvel vs Capcom 2Similar the above, but, not so grounded
Super Street Fighter 2 TurboConsider more as a general SF2 entry, since I played plenty of the SNES releases as a whole (in particular), so it's the mainstay one for me. Alpha series are good, SFIII are good, but at some point with those I'd just rather play the vs games above.
King of Fighters '98Though XIII is also good. Similar to SF2, more the all-inclusive entry for the series to me.
Guilty Gear XXSimilarly, there are a bunch of variants on this, to include the new 2.5D version, light on content as it started out.
Runner ups
Blazblue only due to slight overlap with GGXX.
Last Blade 2Garou: Mark of the WolvesSF Alpha and III
Persona 4 ArenaVampire Saviour