The Wonderful 101 grades all ranked missions in the Story mode on three specific criteria and assigns a medal rating in each of these categories. The average value of your score determines the overall rating for your mission. The highest rank possible, Pure Platinum, requires you to score a Platinum in all three categories, no exceptions. Before every ranked mission in this guide, there is a chart showing you the requirements in each category, across every difficulty, necessary to achieve a Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum medal.

It can be easy to finish a fight quickly without getting harmed, only to miss the combo requirement by so much you don’t even rate a Bronze medal. It’s not just about pure efficiency and never getting hit; it’s also about style, mixing your attacks up, and maintaining a persistent combo multiplier throughout the fight.

Time

Time is easy enough to understand: Complete the fight within a certain amount of time and receive a rating and a point bonus based on that rating. Platinum times tend to be pretty demanding, but are never impossible. If you’re struggling with time requirements, it’s most likely because you’re not fighting the enemy efficiently, either by getting hit a lot, spending too much time juicing up your combo score, or not being aggressive enough to exploit openings revealed by your opponents. Time can be particularly frustrating to achieve during the boss battles, all of which are highly scripted, with numerous phases to battle through before you achieve victory.

Damage

There is one rule to scoring Platinums for the damage rating: Don’t get hit. Ever. Not even a little bit. Yes, even running into an ambient fire counts as damage against your Platinum ranking during a graded mission.

You can make this easier to achieve, primarily through the use of Custom Blocks like Hero Sense, Hero Time, and Hero Counter. The time-dilation effects of Hero Sense and Hero Time can help get you out of harm’s way without a scratch, while Hero Counter lets you bat aside most attacks with surprising impunity, assuming you can get the timing down.

Combo Scoring

A big combo in the making.

This is the most complex part of the scoring system. Your combo score is influenced by numerous factors:

The key to maximizing your point score is to use a variety of Unite Morphs to boost the Combo multiplier. As all your points are tallied up while you go on the attack, a fluctuating Combo multiplier will appear next to the running total of the points being earned from all the bonuses you’re gaining during combat. Boosting it comes from using multiple Unite Morphs in the middle of a combo. If you stick to Unite Claw all day, you might hit the enemy a lot, but your multiplier will be very low, and your total points will suffer in the end.

To counter this, you need to switch between Unite Morphs and summon your teammates to support you with additional Unite Morphs, and you need to use the full extent of your combat skills, mixing in Wonderful Rising, Wonderful Stinger, and Wonderful Cyclone. Different Unite Morphs improve your Combo multiplier by different amounts. Unite Claw is at the low end of that spectrum, while Unite Hand, Sword, and Whip tend to provide the greatest boosts to your combo multiplier while also maintaining your overall efficiency at quickly dispatching your foes.