Which fighting game series should come to Xbox next?

Xbox is in a better state for fighting game fans today than it has been since the genre's Street Fighter IV-fuelled Xbox 360 era renaissance. Still, there's always room for improvement — will one of these be next to throw down?

More and more major fighting games have been coming to the Xbox platform of late, and the future of the genre is undoubtedly looking bright. We've got Street Fighter 6 to look forward to next year, but in the meantime, we've also got the likes of Skullgirls: 2nd Encore finally making its way to Xbox as well as Warner's madcap party fighter MultiVersus launching into open beta later this month. With Evo coming up in a few weeks as the premier event of the competitive calendar for fighting games, what better time to take a look at the major absentees from the Xbox platform — some that haven't appeared on an Xbox console in a while, others that never have, and even one that calls it home but has been dormant for some time — to see what manner of brawling people would most like to see heading to Xbox next...

Guilty Gear

Latest release: Guilty Gear -Strive- (PC/PS5/PS4, 2021)
It's been almost a decade since the last Guilty Gear title graced Xbox with XBLA title Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus, and the series has enjoyed quite the glow-up in that time. Rather than using sprites, modern entries like -Strive- and Xrd use a superb 2D anime-esque look but are actually fully 3D rendered, allowing for some jaw-dropping camera shifts during big plays. This never ceases to impress no matter how many times you see it, and the last few Guilty Gear games just looks incredible in motion. It doesn't hurt that gameplay is also superb, and the casts are wonderfully varied too, with all manner of new and returning oddballs from which to choose. The recently-released DNF Duel — which ArcSys also worked on — utilises a similarly flashy style but places more focus on accessibility, with simplified systems designed to make the fighter as approachable as possible for players of all skill and experience levels, so you could always sub that into this slot if you're new to fighting games... Guilty Gear can perhaps be seen as a little intimidating for newcomers, gorgeous as it may be.

Power Stone

Latest release: Power Stone Collection (PSP, 2006)
As much as Capcom likes to go back to the well to release retro compilations of its legacy fighters, there's one fan favourite (well, two) that never seems to get a look-in. We're talking, of course, about Dreamcast classic Power Stone (and its sequel) — despite still being wildly popular to this day, we've only seen a single rerelease since the originals launched, with a collection of both games for PlayStation Portable way back in 2006. It's a fast-paced arena fighter where stage props and continuously spawning weapons and power-ups (a la Super Smash Bros.) can be used to pound your rivals. Among these pick-ups are the titular Power Stones, which transform your fighter into a more powerful version for a limited time if you can bag three at once. The second game further embraced the chaos, doubling the player count to four and introducing stages that move and change as battles go on, leading to the two titles being able to coexist — the first as a somewhat purer one-on-one fighting experience and the second as a much more entertaining party fighter. It's genuinely surprising that we've seen revivals of many other games from its era but Capcom hasn't revisited Power Stone in over 15 years at this point... oh, how I would love for that to change.

Killer Instinct

Latest release: Killer Instinct (Xbox One, 2013)
I worry this might feel a little out of place here, but I do think it's worth a shoutout so please, hear me out. Rebooting Rare's combo-heavy fighter for the Xbox One launch was a smart play from Microsoft, and while the initial somewhat bare-bones free-to-play release might not have set the world alight, continued support and improved availability in the years that followed opened a lot more eyes to just how solid a fighting game Killer Instinct really was/is. With a lot of last generation's popular fighters skipping Xbox — including tourney headliners like Street Fighter V and many ArcSys games — one by one, Xbox players would find themselves returning to an ever-improving KI and coming away with a new-found respect for it. Game Pass would take this a step further, giving subscribers access to way more characters than the base F2P version and further driving up the game's player count to the point that we now have almost quarter of a million tracked players on TA — more than for all versions of the previous generation's fighting benchmark Street Fighter IV combined. The 2013 release is getting a little long in the tooth now, but after that slow burn towards success and respect from the community, it's good to know that Microsoft has a potentially huge first-party fighting sequel in its pocket, should it want to make Xbox an ever better place for the scene to shine.

Granblue Fantasy: Versus

Latest release: Granblue Fantasy: Versus (PC/PS4, 2020)
Hope you're not tired of hearing about Arc System Works games, because we've got two more for you now, not that this should come as too much of a surprise or a controversial choice when the developer was one of the genre's most notable absentees for much of the Xbox One generation. Based on the mobile smash Granblue Fantasy, Versus feels almost like a spiritual successor to Arc's underrated 360 fighter Battle Fantasia, drawing from fantasy RPG tropes and even taking things a step further than Arc's original title with RPG-flavoured solo modes. Even though it's only two years old, it's unlikely that Granblue will make the jump now — it launched without cross-play or rollback netcode and its player base seemed to dry up pretty quickly, unfortunately, and since Arc has its fingers in so many pies already, ports and major updates to its more niche fighters probably aren't too high on the agenda. Fun as this is, if we had to pick just one ArcSys game to get the Xbox treatment, it'd be the next iteration of Guilty Gear all day long. Still, since we're already being greedy, might as well add a Granblue sequel with cross-play, rollback, and Xbox support to the wishlist too, eh?

BlazBlue

Latest release: BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle (PC/PS4/Switch, 2018)
Sure, we were still getting BlazBlue games on Xbox until as 'recently' as 2015, but PQube's delayed rollout and limited launch with the last Xbox BlazBlue title, Chrono Phantasma Extend, was probably quite telling that demand for the series just wasn't there on the platform to justify further support. It likely won't have helped that despite the series' HD sprites still looking awesome, there has been so much power creep in 2D fighter visuals in recent years that flashier ones like Dragon Ball FighterZ and Guilty Gear were always going to steal the show from more traditional-looking fighters in all but the most hardcore circles — a point that almost goes double thanks to BlazBlue's character-specific gimmicks making it one of the harder modern 2D fighters to learn to a decent standard. We've only actually missed two games on Xbox, namely the excellent BlazBlue: Central Fiction and middling crossover fighter BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, which added characters from Persona 4 Arena, Under Night In-Birth, RWBY, Arcana Heart, and more into the mix for maximum shenanigans. Still, we'd love to see the quirky franchise return to being an Xbox staple one day, just as it was in the 360 years.

Virtua Fighter

Latest release: Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown (PS4, 2021)
This is another slightly strange one, as the latest release in the cult series (and the only recent one we've missed out on) was last year's PlayStation-exclusive final rework of Virtua Fighter 5, Ultimate Showdown, while we already have the original 2007 360 release of VF5 and the 2012 XBLA release of VF5 Final Showdown on Xbox. Shoutouts to my fellow long-suffering VF fans, though, who had to endure a full decade of hoping and dreaming about VF6, only to then see the long-awaited new game be... a limited release of another version of Virtua Fighter 5. A brand-new proper cross-platform sequel is really what I'd want to see here — a slight revamp of a fighting game that is 15 years old (amazing as it may be) isn't really something worth losing sleep over, although seeing Sega still clinging to the old game doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the series has any kind of future. I won't be uncrossing my fingers any time soon, mind, and will continue to dream of a day when I get to unleash Jeffry's mariner's power anew.

Under Night In-Birth

Latest release: Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r] (PC/PS4/Switch, 2020)
I've always had a soft spot for niche 2D fighters, so seeing Melty Blood find its way onto Xbox for the first time last year was like a warming flashback to those 360 glory days when oddities like Arcana Heart could just casually drop in out of the blue to help keep sparring sessions interesting. Under Night In-Birth is a fighter in a similar vein and, like Melty Blood, its titles just keep getting wilder as the series goes on. It's certainly managed to build more of a presence in the scene than many might have expected, with crossover characters making it into BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle and the game even earning a headline Evo slot in 2019. If it can continue this momentum, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it'll join some of its more niche peers on Xbox one day as the team looks to take the franchise to the next level...

Which of these would you most like to come/return to Xbox in the future? Let us know by picking your most-wanted fighter in the poll below, or drop an 'other' vote and let us know which would be your dream Xbox fighting game!

Which fighting game series should come to Xbox next?

Guilty Gear
Power Stone
Killer Instinct
Granblue Fantasy: Versus
Blazblue
Virtua Fighter
Under Night In-Birth
Other (let us know in the comments!)

We've had 599 responses.

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Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.