BLOOD+ One Night Kiss (PS2) - Perfect Kiss Mode | Gameplay Only, No Extras, No Commentary
5Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWiGDBCbRlC1TAe7Rjm4CpVJJPZ3PR6pn
Guides: https://www.speedrun.com/bloodplusonk/guides
Perfect Kiss Mode is the Hard Mode in BLOOD+ One Night Kiss. It is unlocked after beating the game once on Adventure or Action, and it can only be done a NG+ file. In this case, this Perfect Kiss playthrough follows up from my Adventure run, not my Action run.
Unlisted Twitch VOD (with commentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0-heTIF8lU
Despite my initial reservations, I wound up beating it in one sitting, although this certainly wasn't a speed run. I took a few breaks and died five times total; naturally, I spliced all of those out. Amazingly enough, I consider five deaths to be a success, as Perfect Kiss is not very friendly for reasons that I will get into below.
Perfect Kiss is a mixed bag in much the same way ONK itself is a mixed bag. As a NMH1 precursor, the game absolutely has Suda 51's touch, but it's also clear that Grasshopper Manufacture was still figuring out how to make a "sword action game." Perfect Kiss, in turn, being a Hard mode that requires more from the player, highlights both extremes of the game's strengths and weaknesses. For instance, the bosses taking longer to kill means you have to be more methodical, which can be quite fun, but it also forces you to work more against their wonky, questionably-fair attack patterns. And by starting off with upgrades by nature of the NG+, combat from the beginning gives you more to play around with, but it also shows how combat doesn't quite flow smoothly even with those upgrades. That being said, it seems a little silly to complain too much about what's essentially a prototype being a prototype, so I won't dwell on that much beyond these comments.
More miscellanous notes:
-Saya and Aoyama have new default outfits. Saya has a new sword, and Aoyama gets a grenade launcher that makes some parts harder and some easier.
-PK has the same amount of generic enemy encounters as Action, already an aggravating aspect exacerbated by the harder enemies (read: mostly the bat enemies).
-As stated, PK can only be done on a NG+ file. However, one playthrough doesn't give you all of the upgrades, and I only did the single Adventure playthrough on this file beforehand, so I was actually still getting new abilities as the run went on. Funnily enough, that actually resulted in the game feeling smoother in the second half as I started getting moves that helped the combat pacing.
-One disorienting element in PK is that the camera will sometimes shift to the boss's perspective when neither party is attacking. Artifically makes so many bosses that much harder.
-I died five times, all spliced out: 12AM to bats, 1AM to the boss, 3AM to bats (again), and twice to the 4AM boss. Considering what I was up against, much better than expected!
-My component-to-HDMI adapter dropped once again at non-vital spots (before 7PM and at a generic enemy encounter).
-While I skipped most of the cutscenes here, Perfect Kiss actually has slightly different ending cutscenes and even a post-credits bonus scene, which wraps up the game wonderfully. MAJOR SPOILERS, obviously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2XRSegBLhQ
-Beating PK unlocks Blue Mountain Mode, a boss rush mode as Aoyama.
This is my second full playthrough of Perfect Kiss, and while I don't regret it at all (and I'm proud that I finished this run in one sitting), I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to do it again anytime soon. Now that I've finished Perfect Kiss, we can finally get to the thing that I've actually been excited about the most: Blue Mountain Mode!
Blue Mountain Mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKLIfV1x9O8
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