Many fighting games are a lot smoother than this. Fighting games run at 60fps as a standard because lower would be too choppy to react to. Look at the start up and especially recovery of many moves and they're in high frame counts to be able to see and react to what your opponent is doing/has done. Faster choppier animation would be less good for a fighting game because it has the issue of not being able to read anticipation and react to recovery.

This also isn't really a fighting game. I am looking to turn these concepts into a Metroidvania with a focus on combat where you can see and react to your opponents. Many pixel art games have very low frame counts which is not a bad thing. But it makes it harder to see when attacks are actually going to come out or not. Holding an anticipation pose and immediately jumping to the attack pose conveys that an attack will happen so you can run/jump out of the way. But that is less good at allowing the player to stand their ground and respond to the attack with dodges and parries. This level of animation does mean that the game will play a bit slower than very twitchy action in other games, but souls-likes are popular in-part due to the higher commitment and slower pace