Dynasty Warriors: Origins - Visions of the Four Heroes Review - Ain’t Nothing But A Dream State
Dynasty Warriors: Origins was a weird one, for me. I liked it, but didn’t love it. Over time though, my feelings have softened and it’s end up being my most played game in the series. The base game must have done well, because this is the first time I can remember the developers adding meaningful story-based DLC to a game in the series. It’s pretty hefty in both content amount and price, let’s have a look and see if Visions of Four Heroes is actually worth the cost.
The premise is pretty simple. Each of the four stories is something of a ‘what if’ scenario. What if you aligned with someone else, instead of one of the main three houses? What would happen if Zhang Jiao was saved on the battle on the cliffs in the final battle against the Yellow Turbans? I really liked these stories, because it shows an alternate path, and people aren’t always ready for their plans to come to fruition with your assistance.
I don’t want to talk about how the missions progress, you can find that out for yourself. Instead, I will say some of them are among the hardest missions I’ve played in a musou game. These feel like end-game missions (mostly), even though they can be done earlier. You’ll have to pick and choose your battles, and a lot of the time you’ll be playing support, madly dashing across multiple battlefields just to make sure commanders stay alive so the entire warfront doesn’t collapse. Sometimes you’ll be sneaking behind enemy lines to take out a base, to encourage higher morale so officers can fight back against enemy armies better. Almost all the battles are grand in scale, and require actual strategy to complete. Very cool stuff. One of the missions is a 2 on 2 battle that stretched my skill all the way to its ends, and that’s without trying it on Ultimate Warrior difficulty.
For me though, the most interesting thing actually happens between some missions. I am a huge fan of the Empires series, where things are a bit more tactical. It may be blue sky thinking, but you’ll switch to a tactical mode between missions, and I’d like to think this is them testing the water for how people would like more Empires, but in the Origins style.
In this mode, you’ll have a few turns to ‘thin out’ the enemy army before the big conflict. You’ll have armies that attack on their own, and you can do small skirmishes which grant Secret Tactics that you can use during the final conflict. Some of these are super powerful, but I will admit that I kept forgetting to use them. Completing these small skirmishes will also reduce the enemy army size (which greatly outnumbers your own, at the start), as well as removing enemy officers from the combat. If I was to nitpick, I actually wish you could fail them though and make the final battle harder. There was never a time I didn’t wipe out all the enemy skirmishes, even in the limited time. It’s something, I just wish it had bigger negative tactical sway, or that you couldn’t complete them all in the turn limit with some creative accounting.
Each of the four stories took me around five hours to play, so there’s twenty or so hours of content here, at first blush. There’s a slew of extra content though. Returning to the inn between missions gives access to a training ground, where you can try all sorts of challenges to gain new Battle Arts, or to unlock new nodes on the completely new skill tree for the DLC. Two new weapons have been added too, the rope dart and the bow. I’m a bit torn on both. I like the bow, and it’s nice to have a real ranged weapon, but you’ll spend a lot of time holding the block button to shoot arrows, and using normal attacks close range when it’s not held. If you’re in the thick of combat it can be really hard to get those ranged shots off, but it’s fun when you do. The rope dart is fun but I could never get a good rhythm going on for performing attacks then drawing yourself into the enemies range. The new companions are very cool though, it was great to fight alongside them. On top of all of this, new proficiency levels have been added for all weapons, with new unlocks to boot. I didn’t get the chance to play on Ultimate Warrior, but I imagine there’s new unlocks there too, if you’re a sicko for a real challenge.
Visions of Four Heroes costs a lot but it adds a lot of content. I loved the nail biting combat and increased tactical focus, but you will have to drag me to hell before I do another “capture 6 bases” mission willingly. They either take forever, or barely any time with legitimately no in between and I was mad every time they popped up. Other than that, this is definitely worth your cash if you liked the base game. If you didn’t, well, I don’t know what you’re doing here but thanks I guess.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins – Visions of the Four Heroes was played on PC with a code kindly provided by Koei-Tecmo.
