If we were to create a game, I'd say a sidescrolling shooter would most likely be the best.
A brawler needs animations - idle, kicking, death, movement, etc... while a sidescroller would only need an idle pose. Shooting and dying could be animationless.
Basically, I'm saying that a brawler would only work if we had a skeleton animation and then could draw the different parts of the body - head, hands, legs, etc - to be used in that animation. See Chaos faction and Unreal Flash