Dynasty Warriors Origins: Visions of Four Heroes is a conflicted DLC that somehow manages to overdeliver and miss the mark all at once.

I'm going to be blunt: this DLC was not at all what I expected. I very much enjoyed the base game of Origins, which was a robust and modern take on a franchise that is near and dear to my heart. The base game was a very full experience that made me feel justified in buying it at launch for full price – about the rarest praise I can give. That said, the core game had some areas that weren't as fully featured as I would have liked. I was hoping future DLC would expand upon existing ideas and mechanics to give them more richness, denser sub-systems to play with, or more factors to weigh in combat situations.

Visions of Four Heroes does none of these things.

Instead, Visions of Four Heroes provides a smattering of smaller samplings and ideas to contend with. Rather than focus on a continuation of the existing story or adding new mechanics to what currently exists, it mainly centers its time on theoretical what-if scenarios. These four paths have your Wanderer following different figures from the narrative and walking alongside them to get more of their perspective in distinct, bespoke narratives.

These narratives are all self-contained and themselves housed within a self-contained game space. In this what-if realm, enemies are scaled to your current level, whatever that may be, and you gain access to a brand-new talent/skill tree that modifies your stats but only while in this realm. This is an… interesting approach. On the one hand, it allows you to interact with the stories at your leisure, more or less, and jump into them at any point in the campaign. On the other hand, the scaling of enemies and the please-return-all-bonuses-before-exiting-the-theater nature of its benefits make the experience rigid and lacking major long-term rewards.

Despite these concerns, the four stories are all quite good. I won't get into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say I think they're all quite strong. I went in with a rather cynical perspective – it's not like we haven't gotten alternate history tales or “what if you were on the other side?” battles from prior Dynasty Warriors games, after all. Yet the Visions of Four Heroes not only made it past by skepticism, but it also convinced me of the merits of telling these tales. It's hard to even call them alternate histories, as the fundamental differences between these stories and the main story are quite minimal. It's a lot more like being an embedded reporter suddenly plopped on the other side of the battlefield, as many of the outcomes remain the same, and you do not so much change their course as you get to experience the same events from an alternative perspective.

These are the qualities that really make this DLC shine. The base game already had a very strong, unique storytelling style that differentiated itself from many of the prior games. Carrying on this unique voice and exploring other heroes in the various conflicts around the Three Kingdoms is playing to the game's existing strengths, and it delivers in a big way. Your mileage may vary, of course, but as long as you weren't skipping every cutscene in the base game, I think you'll likely find these four stories pass muster.

There are other additions, though admittedly they are much smaller scale. For starters, we get two new weapons: the bow and the rope dart. These are welcome if not groundbreaking. Just like any other weapon in the game, how much positive impact these will have will depend considerably on your approach to combat. I enjoyed both weapons and found myself regularly using the bow long beyond mere novelty. In fact, I found myself switching between bow and favored melee weapons (like my beloved twin pikes) during battles more often because it just felt natural. This is just about the highest praise I can give a new weapon, given my tendency to stick to a handful of favorites outside of missions or side quests rewarding certain armaments.

The Visions of Four Heroes also includes a larger-scale strategic mode. This is where I really got my hopes up and, sadly, where I was most let down. I was hoping for a true strategic-level mode with difficult resource decisions, movement options, and careful planning. In the end, it was just a very slow, very shallow overlay that quacked like a duck but was very obviously a turkey. Dynasty Warriors Origins: Empires this is not.

That's the rub with Visions of Four Heroes overall: it is really good in unexpected ways but fails to deliver what I really wanted. Dynasty Warriors Origins struck me as a marvelous first outing that set a new baseline of expectations, and I was eager for the DLC to build on that foundation in meaningful ways. Instead, the DLC delivers a scattershot of smaller pieces or dead-end tributaries that – while good in their own right – do little to grow the game. It's like enjoying a delicious appetizer, a great main course, and then the waiter walks out with a sample platter of other meals instead of dessert. It's… fine, but not what is expected and breaks the flow a bit.

And I'd be remiss if I did not address the elephant in the room: the asking price. At the time of this writing, the DLC costs US$35. That is half the base game's price, which is – while not surprising compared to past Koei Tecmo releases – steep for a package that is not quite what I'd hoped. It can also retroactively sour the base game, which struck me as an abundance of good gaming for the asking price; with this DLC in the mix, Origins goes from “A lot of darn good gaming for only US$70” to “A pretty decent amount of fun for US$105.”

Ultimately, Dynasty Warriors Origins: Vision of Four Heroes has a lot of strong qualities. The tales it weaves really flex the storytelling style the series is establishing in the modern era. The other additional mechanics are either extremely good (like the weapons) or inoffensive non-starters. That said, it's a grab bag of isolated ideas rather than an expansion of the base game's systems or meaningful additions to the core experience. The level scaling and siloed level progression communicate everything. Take it or leave it, it doesn't change much, but it's fun if you decide to explore it…. and can afford it.