As a longtime fan of Omega Force’s Warriors franchise, Dynasty Warriors Origins was a delight to play at the beginning of 2025. Now, a year later, the developer has served up the chunky Visions of Four Heroes expansion, which offers a series of ‘what if?’ style campaigns for a quartet of prolific Han dynasty officers.
If you liked Origins, chances are that you’ll also enjoy Visions of Four Heroes. There have been some welcome tweaks to progression in aid of trimming the fat, but it remains a super-polished Warriors experience with some incredible large-scale battles. Many of which are among the best the game has to offer. Staring down the barrel of the Coalition Forces on the side of the Yellow Turbans, for example, is an exceptional underdog highlight.
As impressively rich an offering as Visions of Four Heroes is, it’s not a radical overhaul, and thus some of my biggest issues with the base game remain. You’re still locked into playing as Ziluan – the largely expressionless and vaguely defined ‘Guardian of Peace’ – and having precious seconds to play as another officer you bring along as a partner remains a disappointment. Cutscenes also remain stilted and wordy, though I do appreciate the earnest attempt to really flesh out these ‘what could have been’ scenarios.
A dead dream revived
Visions of Four Heroes presents four separate campaigns that are exactly that. From Chapter 2 of the main story onwards, Ziluan has the option of drifting to sleep at an inn, dreaming about what could have been for four legendary officers who, through various comeuppances, weren’t able to realize their version of a unified China.
First up is Zhang Jiao, figurehead of the Yellow Turban Rebellion. After finishing his campaign, you can then choose to align with the tyrant Dong Zhuo, the ambitious general Yuan Shao, or the peerless warrior Lu Bu. Historically, all these men were ultimately undermined by hubris, and Visions of Four Heroes asks where they might have been with a guiding hand (spoilers: that’s us) to course correct when they needed it most.
The Dynasty Warriors series has never been a stranger to such ‘what if’ scenarios, and they’ve always been a fantastic way of adding replay value to each game, as well as allowing the development team to explore more creative stories that diverge from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms canon – itself somewhat of a romanticization of this period of Ancient Chinese history.
In Visions of Four Heroes, there’s a genuinely earnest attempt to explore an alternate path for the featured officers. In the first campaign, for example, we rescue Zhang Jiao from the Coalition Forces and help him reconcile the past sins that put him at the sharp end of their swords.
While cutscenes are still broadly stilted, presented as conversations between several unmoving characters, the writing is nonetheless very solid. If these are officers you’ve been familiar with from the series’ past, there’s a chance you’ll enjoy the character exploration that’s on offer here.
Take your turn
I’ve been really enjoying the changes Visions of Four Heroes brings to help streamline each campaign. The expansion takes you from battle to battle in a brisk manner, largely through a clever reuse of the base game’s overworld map.
Each of the four campaigns takes place over a small chunk of said map, and in between large-scale battles, you’ll go into a simple strategy mode where you move your army against those of your enemies. By making contact with them, you’ll initiate smaller skirmishes that usually have you defeating a specified number of enemy officers or capturing a number of bases.
Successfully completing these skirmishes will diminish the enemy’s army and morale ahead of the larger battle that will take place in a specified number of turns (each skirmish you engage in decreases the turn number by one). Completing them will also reward you with secret tactics – like lightning storms or stat-boosting formations – to aid you even more.
It’s a smart way of truncating the Dynasty Warriors Origins experience into a more bite-sized experience. But that said, each of the four campaigns has a good bit of meat on the bone, coming in at around three to four hours apiece.
You can also head back to the inn – your hub for Visions of Four Heroes – to pick up challenges from officers or engage in various training battles. The rewards for these are certainly worth it, too, ranging from powerful weapons to valuable skill points that can be spent to unlock DLC-exclusive perks like new skills and troop formations.
Lingering doubt
Overall, I think Visions of Four Heroes is a tremendous expansion and adds plenty of value and enjoyment to the already excellent base of Dynasty Warriors Origins. A couple of brand new weapon types and partner officers sweeten the deal, too, offering even more ways to play. It’s just a shame that Ziluan remains the sole playable character of the game, and he’s still unbelievably dull.
I have made peace with Omega Force’s decision to shift to a sole protagonist for Origins. It has at least allowed the developer to change up the way it’s told its version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms to a certain extent. However, I think the concept has been handled better in other Koei Tecmo franchises like Nioh and Rise of the Ronin, where we at least get to create a character to fit into the backdrop of historical events.
One real missed opportunity for this DLC in particular is how it makes use of Zhuhe, another Guardian of Peace who periodically appeared in the base game to offer Ziluan guidance. In Visions of Four Heroes, Zhuhe is available as a partner officer and thus is occasionally playable when her gauge maxes out. For about half a minute.
I do think it would’ve been great to add her as a fully playable character, though, given she’s from the same faction as our main hero. Or at the very least, the game could’ve been much less strict about who we’re allowed to control on the battlefield, and when.
It’s not disastrous; Origins and Visions of Four Heroes remain some of the most fun I’ve had with a game over the past year. I just hope we get a bit of course correction for future Dynasty Warriors games, if only to reintroduce the unabashed charm that helped me fall in love with the series in the first place.
Already great, now even better
So, should you buy Visions of Four Heroes? Despite some unaddressed issues I have with Dynasty Warriors Origins as a whole, I still wholeheartedly recommend this expansion if you enjoyed the base game.
It presents Origins’ combat at its best, with superbly-designed large-scale conflicts, effectively streamlined side battles, and some great new additions in weapon types, formations, skills, and more.
There won’t be much here to change your mind if you weren’t a fan of Origins to begin with, but I can happily say it’s more of the same in (mostly) the best possible way.
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