Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter are probably the most popular fighting vg franchises of all time. 

But there's other great games out there that deserve recognition too.

How about Samurai Shodown?

The one I played the most was Eternal Champions on Genesis, which was kind of Sega's answer to Mortal Kombat. It had really cool lore, a great soundtrack and instead of fatalities each stage had a unique "overkill" that was always cool when you managed to trigger it. But I tried replaying it recently on and the fighting feels really stiff. It's still conceptually awesome, but the gameplay doesn't hold up very well sadly.

The other one I really liked was DBZ: Hyper Dimension on SNES. I only ever played an untranslated emulated version, but I still love the unique style of the character sprites and the animation was really smooth.

Even after all these years, Dragon Ball Fighter Z still looks awesome on Unreal Engine.