Anime fighting games tend to be hit-or-miss, especially regarding their success among the wider fighting game community. For every game like Dragon Ball FighterZ that manages to capture a solid competitive audience, there are a dozen titles like JUMP FORCE and Kill La Kill If that miss out on what makes a fighting game successful outside appealing to an anime's fanbase. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is full of both style and fun, but it ultimately comes up short by lacking a feature that many consider essential to modern fighting games.
With more and more fighting games embracing rollback netcode, seeing a fighting game release without it feels antiquated. All-Star Battle R does not feature rollback netcode, which in turn has greatly limited its appeal. While there are plenty of references and dream matches for fans of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, many have essentially written off the game's online due to the abysmal online experience.
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Rollback netcode has quickly become a standard in many fighting games. The big difference compared to traditional delay-based online netcode is that rollback will send predictions of future button inputs between players. If the game gets the prediction wrong, it will "rollback" its predicted inputs to match the new commands, rather than delaying the game on both ends to fix mistakes. This vastly reduces things like input lag and slowdown, creating an overall smoother competitive online experience.
More and more fighting games are giving rollback netcode the priority it deserves, especially given how prominent online competitive play has become in recent years. Even other remasters of older fighting games, like Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, have prioritized improving their online experiences. Bandai Namco could have even used All-Star Battle R as a way to finally dip their toes into rollback netcode, a feature that's been heavily requested for many of its other fighting games.
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The world of fighting games has hit a point where fans just aren't going to look past a game released without rollback. It's seen as a requirement by fighting game fans rather than an optional quality-of-life feature. Any fighting game that releases without rollback netcode might as well be dead on arrival, which is especially disappointing when said fighting game could have had a solid competitive audience. All-Star Battle R was close to being a perfect remaster of the original, but the lack of online innovation isn't something that can be easily ignored.
All-Star Battle R would have greatly benefited from the inclusion of rollback netcode. One of the biggest selling points of this remaster is that it's a far deeper fighting game experience compared to the original. While the original All-Star Battle suffered from balance issues and a lack of competitive depth, this addresses these issues quite well. There could have been a fairly solid online community around this game, especially since Bandai Namco seems to be planning significant post-launch support for the game.
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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had a fairly significant presence in the competitive fighting game community with one of Capcom's classic 2D fighting games, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage to the Future. Since then, though, there hasn't been a JoJo fighting game that has captured competitive interest. It's disappointing that All-Star Battle R comes so close to the legacy of Heritage to the Future, but misses out on a feature that is almost essential for modern-day competitive fighting game fans.
This isn't to say that All-Star Battle R is without merit. The single-player experience is better than most modern fighting games, especially given how much care was put into crafting each character's moveset. Each character has a solid collection of skills and combos that they can use, with many of those being direct references to the manga and/or anime. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fans should absolutely look into picking up this game for the fan service alone, as the developers clearly care about the series. All of this good just makes the fact that the online is near-unplayable that much more of a disappointment.