The best fighting games like Tekken 3 are Tekken 8, Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown and Soulcalibur VI. Below are 9, 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 Tekken 3 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.
The current entry, and the single-player content is generous again.
The purest 3D fighter, and the most technically respected.
3D fighting with weapons, and a proper story mode.
Faster 3D fighting built around counters.
If you want the best current fighting game with the most to do offline.
Same era, arena fighting instead of one-on-one.
The best single-player campaign in any fighting game.
PS1 fighting stripped to one hit, and unlike anything since.
Capcom's 3D fighter with a full story mode, still a favourite.
A first few hours that can be discouraging alone. Fighting games are far better with someone at your level than against the internet.
The full list is on games like Tekken 3 — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Tekken 8. The current entry, and the single-player content is generous again.
No. Tekken 3 released on the PlayStation, 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 Tekken 3 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.