After successfully reinvigorating the franchise formula with last year’s Dynasty Warriors: Origins, I was eager to see where Omega Force and Koei Tecmo would go next with the series and whether we’d see an “Xtreme Legends” expansion similar to past games. While it may not share the same XL name, the newly-released Visions of Four Heroes DLC is certainly XL in spirit, offering more than just a bonus cluster of campaigns for players to hack and slash their way through.
As the name implies, this first major expansion for Dynasty Warriors: Origins centres on four main characters: Zhang Jiao, Dong Zhuo, Yuan Shao, and Lu Bu. They represent the four powerful antagonists players encounter early on in the series’ Romance of the Three Kingdoms storyline, this DLC effectively giving each one of them a shot at redemption. Even the nasty, tyrannical Dong Zhou!
Not everyone was particularly keen on Origins and the developer’s decision to sack off the usual stacked roster of playable characters in favour of a single enigmatic protagonist. However, as we discussed at the time, Ziluan serves as somewhat of a handy conduit, his mystic trappings allowing him to flit between opposing factions and characters, at least during those early chapters. This gave us a more enriched overview of the setting, story, and the warring perspectives of its key players, where other Dynasty Warriors games typically force you down one of three, faction-aligned tunnels. In Visions of Four Heroes, Ziluan’s penchant for side-swapping gets dialled up to eleven as he travels through time to help out characters who are traditionally viewed as franchise villains.
It’s this kind of thoughtful narrative exploration that marks Dynasty Warriors: Origins as such a turning point for the series. Let’s take the first of the Four Heroes, Zhang Jiao, as a good example. Those who have been playing Shin Sangoku Musou since its debut will remember him as the crazy-haired wizard who lays claim to some of the most chuckle-worthy English-dubbed lines of the PS2 era. Origins completely drops that caricature image, however, portraying him as somewhat of a tragic figure – a religious leader who rallied thousands of famine-stricken peasants, even though their unchecked rebellion would have a devastating impact.
Each new story chapter in Visions of Four Heroes featured a handful of large-scale battles, sandwiched between cutscenes and occasional visits to the new hub-like Inn where players can also partake in new arena style challenges. In order to access the DLC, you will need to have hit certain milestones in the core campaign. Basically, once you’ve defeated each of the four featured characters, their chapter becomes playable.
New story content isn’t the only thing Visions adds to the game; there are two new weapon types, including the Bow and the Rope Dart. As with the core Origins arsenal, each one has its own unique playstyle and mechanics. The bow, for instance, can seamlessly switch between melee and ranged attacks by holding the block button, successive hits allowing you to unleash a powerful charged shot. These weapons have their own progression paths and unlockable special abilities too, with all base weapons from the game having been supercharged with additional ranks for the expansion.
Visions also introduces a new way of framing larger conflicts with its “Strategic Battles”. You’ll encounter several of these in the DLC, each one transporting the player to a smaller, more self-contained map where individual enemy and allied units take turns to move and engage. Left to their own devices, units will whittle down one another’s troop reserves before moving onto the next fight though, amidst all this, players can use one of their actions per turn to join in these skirmishes: smaller bouts of hack n’ slash combat that typically require you to defeat a general or capture a main base.
In truth, there’s not much scope for feats of tactical genius. To reduce friction and make the battles themselves a little easier, you’ll want to join fights where your allies are struggling, preventing their unit from being routed which would reduce your total troop count in the final battle. To help with this, a handful of Tactics can be used while navigating the world map, buffing allies and hampering enemies before a skirmish has even started. Each minor victory will also reward you with a panel of Secret Tactics that can be used in combat, such as the ability to summon a hurricane, or create an area of effect that charges your Musou gauge.
While Strategic Battles lack true tactical depth, they’re a clever way of reframing what would otherwise be a straightforward gauntlet of battles for each chapter in the DLC. It’s not hard to imagine Omega Force evolving this concept for when the studio (hopefully) delivers an Empires-style spin-off for its Dynasty Warriors reboot.
