The JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle team is “upset” by the response to the game’s controversial micro-transaction system, and will make adjustments, the game’s developers shared with Siliconera.
While JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle sold very well during its first week in Japan, the game received a lot of flak for including a system in its Campaign mode that imitated the pay-for-time/cooldown systems that many free-to-play mobile games use.
Here’s how it works: The player has a “Battery” with 10 segments, and each fight in Campaign mode requires the use of at least one. These segments recover over time. Alternatively, items to restore Battery can be purchased off of PSN. Naturally, this irritated a lot of players, and was a contributing factor to a sudden dip in the game’s price, shortly after launch.
Although the recharge rate for Batteries has been sped up from 20 minutes per-bar to 5 minutes per-bar in a recent patch in Japan, the inclusion of the system is still a point of contention for a number of players, who feel it shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Siliconera asked CyberConnect2 CEO Hiroshi Matsuyama and Namco Bandai’s Noriaki Niino if this system would still be in the game when the English version releases.
Niino replied that the system was implemented so “people could enjoy the game longer,” and while the international version will have “lots of adjustments and improvements,” it will largely be the same as the Japanese version. He added that the team was “upset” that fans misinterpreted their intentions to make the game have more replay value, but that they are looking for a way to make amends, perhaps by offering something that might have been a paid item for free.
The development team is currently making adjustments to that system in the Japanese version, and those adjustments will be reflected in the game’s international release.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle is set for a 2014 release in the US and Europe.
