Just as DOOM casts a shadow over every modern FPS and Dungeon & Dragons casts a shadow over every computer RPG, Street Fighter casts a shadow over contemporary fighting games, being the origin of now-iconic features, like rosters of colorful characters, stun-locking combos, and a "rock-paper-scissors" dynamic to combat. The following fighting games do owe much to Street Fighter, conceptually, but diverge in interesting ways from the Street Fighter formula, thanks to having original mechanics and innovative premises.
Street Fighter 2, released by Capcom in 1991, pioneered and popularized the general gameplay structure seen in games like Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and King Of Fighters even to this day: A roster of fighters duels each other in a two-dimensional map, each with the ability to punch, kick, jump, and crouch. Each character has special abilities, such as fireballs, rising punches, dash attacks, and counters, accessible with special button inputs. Strikes are countered by blocks, blocks are countered by grapples, and grapples are interrupted by strikes, and certain attacks can be strung together to create combos capable of stun-locking foes - a game mechanic that arose in the original Street Fighter II by accident.
Most of the fighting game franchises on the market stick to this formula, preventing both fighting game newcomers and veterans from having to learn a completely new ruleset in each game. (Many of these games also include protagonists with movesets similar to Ryu from Street Fighter, so new players have a familiar characters to start with.) A few fighting games try to expand on the Street Fighter formula with extra mechanics, as in the Super Smash Bros. series' platforming gameplay and two to eight-player matches. The following fighting games, however, are wildly different from Street Fighter 2 by virtue of having completely distinct design goals.
Unique Fighting Games: Hellish Quart
The realistic sword-fighting game Hellish Quart, recently released on Steam in early access, is the brainchild of "Kubold," a Polish developer who previously did motion-capture work for The Witcher 3. Heavily inspired by Polish swashbuckling adventures and period dramas like The Deluge, the characters of Hellish Quart are talented yet mortal sword-masters who can be felled by a single strike to their vitals. Among the game's roster are saber-wielding szlachta nobles from 17th century Poland's aristocratic republic, musketeers with rapiers and feathered hats, and knight-like wielders of German longswords. Each character's blades, garments, and techniques are based on the motion-captured movements of real European martial arts practitioners.
Unique Fighting Games: Bravery Network Online
Like many popular fighting games, Gloam Collective's Bravery Network Online is about a group of eccentric, colorful fighters battling each other to the death in a blood tournament. In contrast to fighting games with contemporary or historical fantasy settings, Bravery Network Online takes place in a post-apocalyptic, post-singularity science fiction setting - a world frozen in ice, with a high-tech Tower whose immortal inhabitants (drawn similarly the style of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels) challenge each other to deathmatches motivated by a mix of boredom, the desire to earn social currency, and their ability to automatically resurrect if they fall to each other in battle. Rather than taking on the role of one of the fighting game characters, the player plays the part of a sports coach who assemble teams of fighters, trains and equips them, and coordinates their actions in Pokémon-style, turn-based combat.
Unique Fighting Games: Gang Beasts
Gang Beasts, a party fighting game created by the indie studio Boneloaf, can best be described as a "ragdoll physics fighting game," in which cartoonish, primary-colored characters spastically flail at each other in extremely hazardous arenas. The deliberately awkward control scheme of Gang Beasts lets players punch, grab, and and jump on practically anything with their hands, letting them punch, grapple, and throw stuff at their foes in rounds of combat made chaotic by the game's physics engine. The farcical brawls of Gang Beasts, where players try to stun and hurl each other into pits of death, are complicated by hazardous arena maps, such as the top of two speeding trucks, busy subway systems, or an aquarium with a killer kraken in one of the tanks.
Unique Fighting Games: Fight Crab
Fight Crab is exactly what it sounds like: a game about crabs who fight each other. Like the viral video of a stray crab brandishing a kitchen knife, players of Fight Crab choose from a roster of weapon-wielding crustaceans, such as snow crabs, long arm crabs, coconut crabs, mantis shrimp and lobsters. The goal is to knock the other player's crab onto their backs, a task aided by a wide variety of crab-sized weapons, like swords, halberds, throwing stars, guns, hammers, drills, and podracing engines, along with unlockable abilities like ki attacks. Street Fighter, this certainly is not.