Over the years, there has been a number of titles that are not fighting games, yet have offered their own unique solutions for dramatic one-on-one duels. A few of the games covered so far already belong in that category, strictly speaking, but they still put the fighting in the centre of the experience.

Others are more complex, so it wouldn't be possible to do them justice in the context of a fighting game article. Some of these have already been covered on their own, such as the Indiana Jones adventures by LucasArts, where Indy occasionally gets into fistfights with his enemies. After Karateka, Jordan Mechner tried to bring the thrill of Errol Flynn's Robin Hood swordfighting to computer screens with Prince of Persia (1989).

Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon (1987) by Cinemaware combines light adventuring elements, strategic battles and a number of arcade style mini games. Among them is of course a fighting sequence, which is quite different between the various ports. The Amiga version has side view duels with huge sprites but terrible joystick controls. The Atari ST and IBM PC versions are mostly the same and use a more zoomed out view for the fighting. The Commodore 64 even has first-person fencing, where the player moves Sinbad's sword between five screen positions to parry his attacker's strikes.

Around the same time, corsair captains in Sid Meyer's Pirates! (1987) fought duels as a representative of the crew's struggles against enemy forces. Finally, Origin Systems' Moebius series, consisting of the original game and it's sequel Windwalker, are fully-fledged RPGs in an oriental martial arts setting, and introduce a peculiar icon-based combat system.

On the Japanese side, there is the MSX shooting game Alpha Roid (1986). Here, the player's mecha can be steered into holes in the ground, where he engages into fights for extra weapons with other giant robots.