I got the achievement for “Beating the Game with Rank B or higher”, but I’ve only finished Ch. 9. Maybe the ranks I did get mean that even with 0’s on the remaining missions, I’ve reached B?
I’ve tried to go back and re-play some earlier missions now that I have all the legions, since there were missions that were simply inaccessible on the first playthrough (behind doors gated by legions you don’t have yet). There’s a bunch of stuff that’s basically impossible the first time through (see also: the bit where Alan’s hanging over a ledge, and you just kind of have to know which of the 3 paths to take in order to save him). Or even things like “better have an anti-stun legion on this encounter, otherwise you’re going to get fucked”.
Replaying is…kind of annoying. There aren’t enough ways to skip story bits. I’m trying to get S+ on the intro mission (the one on the bike), but I keep getting an A, and getting to the actual combat in that missions takes me through a bunch of cutscenes, including re-selecting my character’s gender. Replaying File 2 makes you sit through all of Marie’s base tutorials over again. I actually liked all the stupid detective work the first time around, but I don’t love being forced to replay them to get to the missions I want to rank up. I don’t really want to wander around the Astral Plane ten times. You can skip to chapters within files, but I want to just play one encounter over and over until I get the rank I want (your file “progress” already seems to take your best score for each encounter).
It seems like it might get harder to S+ rank things when you’re more powerful, since your attacks do more damage, and you have less opportunity to do fancy things before you kill the enemy. The levels I consistently get low ranks are, are the ones with only 1 or 2 big enemies. Long multi-wave encounters are way easier to S+ rank on.