The best arcade games like Super Smash Bros Ultimate are Super Smash Bros, Super Smash Bros Melee and Power Stone 2. Below are 6, 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 Super Smash Bros Ultimate 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 N64 original, and still the easiest one to hand four people.
The competitive one — faster, more technical, and a scene twenty-odd years deep.
The 3D arena cousin, where the stage and the furniture are the weapons.
Four players, one arrow each, and the fastest local matches there are.
If Smash was your on-ramp and you now want the genre proper, with a mode that teaches it.
Six-player versus in a Saturn brawler, and far deeper than it looks.
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 Super Smash Bros Ultimate that are not arcade games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Super Smash Bros Ultimate — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Super Smash Bros. The N64 original, and still the easiest one to hand four people.
No. Super Smash Bros Ultimate released on the Nintendo Switch, 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 Super Smash Bros Ultimate 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.