8 Best SNES Fighting Games

Power Instinct is the English name for Gouketsuji Ichizoku, an Atlus fighter about a family tournament. Every so often the clan fights it out to decide who gets to run things. You pick from 8 characters on a 4-button pad. Double jumps and double dashes keep you moving, and you can knock your opponent through the barrier at either side of the stage to make it bigger.

Retro reviewers like it for its strange mix of fighting and comedy. The SNES version looks and sounds better than the Sega one, though it lost the karaoke mode on the way over. That is a real loss. In the English version every character also got a single win quote instead of one for each foe. Still, you get Otane, a grandmother whose projectile is her own dentures.

Super Street Fighter II came to the SNES in 1994, the third Street Fighter on the console after the original and Turbo. It added four new characters, Cammy among them, and all the tweaked stage backgrounds from the arcade. At 32 megs it was the biggest SNES cartridge yet, if the box is to be believed. There is also a new scoring system that tracks your combos and reversals.

Retro reviewers call it one of the best ports of the 16-bit era, and it is packed with modes. Group Battle lets two friends pit 8 fighters against 8, and Tournament Mode handles 8 players. The catch is speed: it runs at the slower Champion Edition pace, a step back from Turbo. It also tanked in stores, so plenty of people skipped it. That is a shame.

Konami made a different Turtles fighter for each console, and the SNES one is the best of the three. Shredder is playable for the very first time, and the cast pulls in characters from the comics like Wingnut and Armaggon, with Rat King and Karai as bosses. In Story Mode the turtles search the city after Splinter and April are kidnapped by the Foot.

It plays fast, with combos and counters taken from Street Fighter II Turbo and Fatal Fury 2. The Mutant Meter fills as you fight and lets you unleash a huge finishing move, an idea that only became common after this game. You can turn the speed way up in the options, too. It came out as the Turtles craze was fading, so not many people noticed it. Today it is in The Cowabunga Collection, with online play for the SNES version.

Mortal Kombat II is the sequel to the 1992 original, and it takes the tournament to Outworld. Earthrealm's fighters battle Outworld's on their way to Shao Kahn, the emperor who wants to conquer Earthrealm. It plays like an improved version of the first game. The juggling in the first game was an accident, and the sequel tightened it up. It was released to enormous commercial success, and it is often called one of the greatest video games ever made.

Players who grew up with it pick the SNES version. One called it "probably the best console port of that game". It is also the Mortal Kombat players name first for the SNES, ahead of every other game in the series. If you want digitized fighters and finishing moves, start here.

Turbo is the SNES port of Hyper Fighting, and despite the name, this port also contains the Champion Edition version of the game as its Normal mode. It brought back things the first SNES port had cut. The announcer says the country names again, and the barrel-breaking bonus stage is back. It sold 4.1 million copies, and Nintendo put it on the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017.

Players still name it next to the big SNES classics when someone asks what to play. It is the version for people who want the faster game, and it holds up. You can still sit a friend down and be trading fireballs in minutes, which is more than most games from 1993 can say.

Super Punch-Out!! is the fourth game in the Punch-Out!! series, made by Nintendo's own team led by Genyo Takeda. It came out in North America on October 24, 1994, and Japan only got it in 1998, as a Nintendo Power flash cartridge. You get three minutes to knock out each opponent. There are four circuits, and the fourth only opens if you have never lost a fight.

Reviewers praised its cartoon style and its colorful, outlandish opponents, and the controls are simple enough for anyone. It is a boxing game, so it is the odd one out here. Players do not care. They list it right next to the SNES heavy hitters like Super Metroid and A Link to the Past.

Killer Instinct hit arcades in October 1994, and the SNES got it the following year. It borrows the attack set of Street Fighter and the idea of finishing moves from Mortal Kombat. Rounds work differently, though: each fighter has two life bars, and you win by draining both. It is famous for automatic combos, and for Ultra Combos that go over 80 hits.

The sprites had to be toned down for the cartridge, but an 8 player Tournament Mode was put in, and the box came with a 16 track CD of the music called Killer Cuts. That music was the first work Graeme Norgate and Robin Beanland did for Rare. Players still rate it as one of the SNES fighters to own, and it still looks wild for a 16-bit cartridge.

Street Fighter II is the sequel to 1987's Street Fighter, and it vastly improved many of the concepts introduced in the first game. Special moves come from directional and button commands, and it added a combo system along with a wider selection of playable characters, each with a fighting style of their own. You beat the other seven main fighters, then the Grand Masters, which includes Sagat from the first game. After each match, a world map picks the next stop.

More than 6.3 million SNES cartridges were sold, making it the highest-selling third-party game on the SNES. Players still put it on their lists of SNES essentials, right next to Mario and Zelda. It is the game that brought the arcade home.