The best arcade games like Guardian Heroes are Streets of Rage 4, Fight'N Rage and Gunstar Heroes. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made Guardian Heroes worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The best modern beat-em-up, and it honours the classics.
Branching routes and multiple endings, made by people who studied this era.
Treasure's other Genesis-era masterpiece.
Same generation, same commitment to being unlike anything else.
The most fun four-player brawler in years.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Guardian Heroes that are not arcade games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Guardian Heroes — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Streets of Rage 4. The best modern beat-em-up, and it honours the classics.
No. Guardian Heroes released on the Sega Saturn, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Guardian Heroes list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.