Just to clarify, after I brought all the LP's to Rodin he went to make the weapons. I didn't go to the shop until I was a few chapters into the game. I'm pretty sure the first item he built were shotguns which I was given, but my memory is a bit fuzzy. The next visit he built two weapons on my same trip. When he got back, I saw the weapons for sale and I wasn't given them. This had to be the sword and whip because the claws just became available. I remember them being for sale and not having enough money at the time and having to wait until the next level to get it. At the time I hadn't bought anything, so I clearly remember having to wait on buying them. I'm 99% sure I bought the whip. I don't remember how I ended up with the sword. If there is not an alternate to the whip or sword I don't know what else I could have spent $100K on. Perhaps it was the pistols or shotguns but I'm pretty sure he gave me the shotguns in his shop and that the pistols are the ones I started the game with.
After playing the game for a bit more this morning, it's beginning to get tedious for me, so I think I'm going to give it a break and start over at a later time. After all the comments, I'm reading (which some are helpful and some aren't) it's clear to me that I'm not playing the game correctly. Some comments that particularly baffle me are people saying that beating the game on normal shouldn't require buying any green healing lolipops, specialty items or even get hit while dodging and the game is on normal. There have been several times when I'm in the middle of a dodge and I get hit anyway. There's also times when I'm getting spammed with attacks and there's no way to get evade them - dodging won't work and there's no counter attacks that I know about. So if what I'm being told is true, I'm missing a pretty big part of how to play this game.
At this point, all I can say is that I must be missing something, because I'm not getting any better at it. Combos and dodging should be pretty easy, but everything just seems random as to whether or not my attacks and dodges work. I've never had this problem before and I've been playing games for a while. This begs the question of whether it's me or the game. Well, going off of GAF, it's me. I just fought a giant Angel with tentacle arms on level 10 for about 20 minutes and finally turned the game off because all I could do was shoot at him. There was only one opportunity I had to strike him with my sword. Everything else was dodging his attacks, getting closer trying to lure him down and then running away. I don't get it. My experience has not been a good one at all which is unfortunate, because I really want to like this game.