8 Best Nintendo 3DS Fighting Games

WWE All Stars is the only WWE game on the 3DS, and it plays like a cartoon of a wrestling match. The wrestlers have an exaggerated look and the moves go over the top. John Cena leaps high into the air for his Attitude Adjustment. The 3DS version came out in North America on November 22, 2011, with two new modes and all the DLC characters already on the cartridge.

Path of Champions is a 10-match gauntlet with its own storylines. Fantasy Warfare is the better mode. It is a run of 15 dream matches that put a Legend of the past against a modern Superstar of a similar type, and winning them unlocks ten of the 30-man roster, Shawn Michaels and Edge among them. Gauntlet mode then sends the entire roster at you.

Kirby Fighters started as a minigame inside Kirby: Triple Deluxe. It is a Smash Bros.-style fighter where you customize your own Kirby, give it one of ten copy abilities and battle other Kirbys on stages based on levels from the series. Nintendo then sold an enhanced version on its own as a download from the eShop, out in North America on August 29, 2014. It has new stages and gameplay features, and it unlocks extra content if it finds Triple Deluxe save data.

This is the lightest game on the list. A match takes a couple of minutes and anyone who has played a Kirby game knows the moves already. It is a good pick for a younger player or for a quick fight between friends. Nintendo liked the idea enough to make a follow-up, Kirby Fighters 2, for the Switch in September 2020.

Extreme Butoden was developed by Arc System Works and is the sixth game in the Butōden series. It was the first Butōden game released outside Japan, France and Spain, and it reached North America on October 20, 2015. It mixes the older Butōden games with Arc System Works' earlier Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors 2.

Fights are one-on-one, but you bring a team of battle and support characters, and the game has over 100 characters in all. Z-Assist support characters jump in with special moves during a fight. Destruction Points rank how strong each fighter is, which lets you limit how many powerful characters a team can use. The split screen of the old games is gone, so both fighters stay in view the whole time. If you love Dragon Ball, this is the 3DS game for you.

BlazBlue is the most technical fighter here, a 2D anime game with a cast of very strange characters and a lot to learn. Continuum Shift II was an arcade revision of Continuum Shift, and its 3DS port came out in Japan on March 31, 2011, on the same day as the PSP version.

The handheld ports are generous. They include all the characters sold as downloadable content on home consoles: Makoto Nanaya, Valkenhayn R. Hellsing and Platinum the Trinity. They also add balance tweaks and a new mode called Abyss. The 3DS buttons are small for a game this demanding, but if Street Fighter IV feels too slow for you, this is the 2D fighter to sink your hours into.

Tekken 3D: Prime Edition brings the full Tekken 6 cast to a handheld, all 41 fighters. It is only the second Tekken game on a Nintendo platform, after Tekken Advance in 2001. Series producer Katsuhiro Harada said it would run at a full 60 frames per second even with the 3D effect on, and that speed is the reason to play it.

The rest is thin. The 21 Tag Challenges announced before release are missing from the retail game, and 40 planned stages never made it in. GamesRadar gave it 5/10, praising the roster and the graphics while criticising the lack of single-player modes. Tekken fans can live with that. It is still a big, fast 3D fighter on a handheld, and it is at its best when you have someone to play against.

Dead or Alive: Dimensions came out on May 19, 2011. It was the first Dead or Alive on a Nintendo console and the first fighting game in the series on a handheld. It has 26 playable fighters, more than any earlier game in the series, running on a modified Dead or Alive 4 engine. The story mode is a brief version of the stories of the first four games.

You can use the touch screen to pull off special moves while the fight plays on the top screen. With the 3D turned off it runs at 60 frames per second. StreetPass builds an AI copy of you from the way you play, and other owners can fight it in Throwdown mode. It was also the first game made without series creator Tomonobu Itagaki, and the quick, smooth fights suit a handheld very well.

Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition was a launch title for the 3DS in 2011, and it sold 1.1 million copies. Capcom had once thought about a Super Street Fighter IV port for the DS or PSP, but Ono felt neither handheld would satisfy him. Then Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi showed him Resident Evil 5 running on a 3DS, and Ono threw together a quick build of Super Street Fighter IV in a couple of weeks.

The touch screen has icons for special moves, added to help lapsed players get back into the series. Switch to Pro mode and you do them by hand again. Dynamic Mode trades the side view for an over-the-shoulder camera that shows off the 3D. StreetPass lets you swap character figurines with other players and use them in figurine battles. NGamer UK called it a "staggering port of an exceptional fighting game".

Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS was the first portable entry in the series. Up to four players battle locally or online, on stages inspired by classic portable Nintendo games. The roster, shared with the Wii U version, has 58 characters counting the downloadable ones, with guests from some third-party franchises next to the Nintendo cast. The Ice Climbers were planned but removed because of the 3DS's technical limitations.

Online, For Fun has random stages and items, and For Glory records your wins and losses with no items on Omega stages. Classic mode borrows an intensity setting from Masahiro Sakurai's Kid Icarus: Uprising, where you spend in-game currency to make it harder for greater rewards. The 3DS version sold over nine million copies by September 2022, and players recommend it more than any other 3DS fighter.