The best fighting games like Astral Chain are Bayonetta, Devil May Cry 5 and The Wonderful 101. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to fighting costs you.
Filtering to fighting means you want a contest with a clear answer — you got it right or you did not. It is the right filter when what you liked was reading an opponent.
What you get: A skill ceiling you can actually see yourself climbing, and the shortest feedback loop in games.
What made Astral Chain worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the fighting part of that answer, and only the fighting part.
PlatinumGames' own template, and the combat depth is the closest match.
The best-feeling character action game of the generation.
Controlling a crowd rather than a character — the same divided-attention idea.
Platinum again, and built around one very good mechanic.
Underrated Platinum action if you want more of the same combat.
A first few hours that can be discouraging alone. Fighting games are far better with someone at your level than against the internet.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Astral Chain that are not fighting games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Astral Chain — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Bayonetta. PlatinumGames' own template, and the combat depth is the closest match.
No. Astral Chain 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.
Much less than they were. Modern control schemes, rollback netcode and real single-player modes have changed the on-ramp completely in the last few years.
One opponent against one, or one against many. They share ancestry and almost nothing else — the picks below say which each one is.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Astral Chain list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is fighting — 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 fighting guide for where to start in the genre generally.