Instead, you just do as much as possible, working through the list. Cycle through every weapon, cycle through every legion. Skills skills skills, getting them chained up and likely some hits on their back in the process. Do some perfect calls, even if it means sitting there letting an enemy hit you numerous times as you fuck it up, dragging out the fight, because that bonus adds up. Don't forget to get a headshot or two. Maybe get a barrier up at times. Dodge decently, sync as much as possible, see if you can get a chain attack in at some point, be sure to tap A here and there near enemy deaths, repeat. End up just using gladius + axe more often than not when you feel like you've hit all those points and can just kill things now. Watch as it inexplicably calls you sloppy, says that you used only long-range attacks despite using all of the weapons (I honestly still have no idea what this one was ever trying to tell me), seemingly comments on several other flaws as well, and yet that S+ still shows up. Except for the times where the fight's over in an instant and you just didn't do enough despite your strength; have a D for not somehow taking an eon to get all those moves in! And I'm sure this isn't even touching on some things people would say to put on such a list, because this is just what I fell into when left by myself; it's what I was thinking in literally every fight, with the extra fun of being constantly unsure/worrying about whether it was actually grading me for anything I was doing before a (possible) bigger enemy in that red case or not!
I hit the end credits on my first run (Pt Standard) today, and intended to jot down a lot of my impressions, but the post above has saved me a lot of time and effort.
I found the majority of Astral Chain enjoyable, fascinating, and wonderfully varied, and a tiny sliver of it utterly infuriating (we'll get to that)—very much like my experience with Bayonetta 1, in fact, albeit with more interesting non-combat interstitials, but critically, no real incentive to replay or improve. The scoring system doesn't correspond to good play, and in many cases actively rewards poor play, so pushing for S+ across the board just doesn't strike me as a meaningful experience. It doesn't do its job at all, by which I mean the traditional job of a medal/scoring system to provide a metric for steady improvement.
I haven't dug into the scoring system in any detail beyond just observing it as the numbers rolled in, but I think the primary problem here is that time is severely undervalued. There is so little scoring difference between clearing an objective quickly and letting the time run down to the minimum score of 1250 that it is pretty much always,
always advantageous to drag out a fight and rack up points with a high variety of chip damage, as that is more than enough to cover the deficit. Once I had a critical mass of skill variety coming out of the early chapters—and to be clear, it
was incredibly satisfying to get over the hump of figuring out how to chain my own moves with my Legion's (especially if you're me and you didn't even notice the in-game Help manual until one chapter from the end)—S/S+ ranks poured in for every fight where the enemies lasted long enough. But for the shorter skirmishes like one-off missions in the street, you can play fast and clean and still wind up with a B or C because there just wasn't time to use the move set, and there isn't an incentive to improve because the solution to this is
not to play faster and cleaner.
Worse yet, I was scoring S+ for fights that felt
terrible, where I was blundering all over the place and seriously questioning whether I understood the enemies or the game at all. It was like a participation trophy for trying a bit of everything to see what sticks. In other systems-heavy games like The Wonderful 101, you know subjectively when a bad score is coming—usually due to time and damage—and when it hits you, it feels deserved. As you learn the systems piece by piece, the scores get better; action, reaction. Not so much here, at least on Pt Standard.
It may just be the case that Astral Chain is a game where traditional PlatinumGames trappings like the medal system are really not the point, but an afterthought bolted onto a game where the challenge is in surviving, responding to creative boss mechanics, breaking enemy defences, and finding satisfying matches of toolkit and target. I'm not convinced the scoring accomplishes anything other than screaming at the player to experiment with the full move set—and while some other players might need to be nudged that way, that's how I like to play anyway. Maybe Pt Ultimate (just for survival and clearing the fights, not caring at all about medals) is the answer here, but I doubt I'll ever put in the time.
*
That undersells how much I liked Astral Chain, and how much I have to praise about it. It's vivid and stunning, a far more coherently realized piece of science fiction than I expected from this studio, and aesthetically a delight all over. The expressiveness of the combat system really shines in the long fights, especially if you play not to just tick off the whole checklist of the rotation for the S+ score, but for the satisfaction of finding the right tool for the job.
Like my first run through Bayonetta 1, though, it seemed like once or twice every File I would run into something horrendous that momentarily made me loathe the game, before a subsequent fight or sequence brought me back to loving it. Often it would be something fussy like a stealth segment, or a chase that resets you over and over until you understand how to read what the triggers are or what you're supposed to do. Generally, Astral Chain has a serious control problem with putting far too much on the thumbsticks, with the result that movement interferes with everything. It took me several chapters of fiddling with the camera/lock-on settings before I could comfortably draw the chain while moving (to lasso enemies with the loops, for instance).
But the worst thing about the game
by far is the aiming camera. Every time I ran into a situation where I had to pull off a directional slash with the Sword on short notice, I groaned. Every single instance of this was horrid. It's fidgety enough already
without moving targets or time pressure, and with all that, it's unbearable.
Part of this is that I'm a bit of a motion-aiming purist who
hates dual analogue and hasn't had to deal with significant stick-based aiming since the GameCube, because I go out of my way to avoid it. Gyro aiming is the most elegant solution for one of these problems (the targeting; it doesn't solve the other problem, the direction of the sword slash, which feels like it was designed for the control scheme of Skyward Sword, and probably would have felt amazing if it did in fact play like Skyward Sword).
And the thing is, Astral Chain actually does have a motion assist—which was the only thing that made the Arrow target shooting bearable for me, and indeed very useful for some long-range snipes in fights—but no sensitivity setting.
I play with a sensitivity of +4 in Splatoon 2. Astral Chain's aiming feels like a -4, and so far as I can tell, you can't do anything about it. You could be forgiven for not even realizing gyro support is in the game apart from the box-stack minigames (again an idea grafted from Skyward Sword), because it's
so bloody slow. There is, in consequence, no good snap-aiming solution to the directional slashes, yet plenty of mechanics that force you to pull it off quickly. (And one of the reasons I'll never push for chapter-wide S+ ranks is that there is absolutely no way I'll ever pull that off in the Arrow target-shooting minigames.) It's a mismatch of what the game demands and what the controls are suited to do.
I think it's all so bewildering to me because there have been so many control innovations over time—Skyward Sword, the Switch port of Okami HD, and indeed the dual drawing system of W101 (where I always did prefer the tablet over the stick for certain motions like drawing loops around NPCs, which is exactly what you do in this game)—that felt like they would have better accommodated what Astral Chain is trying to do. And a simple gyro sensitivity setting would go so far towards addressing this.
I played the whole game on the Pro Controller, too, so it's not like the tight movement range or notorious drift of the Joy-Con sticks were the problem here. The problem is all in the interface design: there's just way too much going on with the sticks. Too much stick-aiming. Too much stick-clicking. Too much that you can't pull off accurately unless your left-stick movement stops dead.
*
I might poke around in the postgame at some point, and I do think I got a substantial amount of value out of what I did play. 32 hours for a standard run, doing tons of optional content but by no means all of it, is a meaty experience for a PG action game and a welcome change of pace. There's a lot in Astral Chain that knocked my socks off, and I appreciate how it brought back that element of unfettered (if unpolished)
wildness that Bayonetta 2 totally dropped from Bayo 1.
But I think the strongest indictment of this game is that even halfway through, loving most of what I was seeing, I already understood that I would probably never play it twice. (If anything, it's given me the itch to pick up W101 all over again.) Nothing wrong with a game that is a mostly terrific play-once experience, of course, but from PG, that's unusual.