What is Story Mode in Dynasty Warriors Origins?

Once you’ve completed one Dynasty Warriors Origins storyline, you’ll unlock Story Mode. This handy feature puts the whole game at your fingertips, and allows you to unlock more content than you could experience in the first playthrough. Think of it as a more controllable New Game+. You can easily start back at Chapter 1 and play again with your fully powered-up character or unlock more interesting things.

For example, you could start unlocking the Wei, Wu, or Shu True Ending Routes - some of which are harder to unlock than others. Dynasty Warriors Origins players will unlock this automatically, but what exactly can you do with Story Mode, once you have it?

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The Story Mode option in Dynasty Warriors Origins makes the game easier to complete

Whether you beat the game as Wei, Wu or Shu in Dynasty Warriors Origins, this will unlock Story Mode for you. As soon as you save after beating the game once, you’ll return to one of the many inns in the game and learn what sorts of content you’ve unlocked. This includes the Forge system and Ultimate Musou difficulty, but more importantly, you get Story Mode.

You can go back to any fight at any time through Story Mode (Image via Koei Tecmo)

When you visit an inn during your gameplay, you can select Story, to open up a new menu. All five chapters are there, including the various factions you’ve unlocked for play. That means after beating the game once, you will see just that one faction, but you’ll also see where their True Ending Route begins.

Just search through the Chapters until you see a branching path, and a golden banner. That’s how you begin playing through the various True Ending stages, such as Shu’s. You don’t have to play through the first three chapters again to unlock more factions, either.

Just start at Chapter 3, complete mission for the faction you want to unlock next, and there you go! Dynasty Warriors Origins’ Story Mode allows you to go back and forth, between factions, chapters, and stages completely at will. You can swap to say, Wu or Shu anytime you like, as long as you beat the current stage you were on. Then, you can come back to that route whenever you’d like, but it’s easier to just do one faction at a time.

This is how I unlocked all the True Endings - just skipping to where I needed to be and winning those stages (Image via Koei Tecmo)

Now, play through their whole storyline — Chapters 3 through 5 — to unlock the True Ending Route for those other two factions in Dynasty Warriors Origins’ Story Mode.

However, if you’ve somehow missed something or want to go back to a previous part of the game to work on building up someone’s Bond, this is another fantastic use of Story Mode — in addition to simply repeating stages, if you want to challenge them again — such as successfully defeating Lu Bu at the Battle of Hulao Gate.

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Dynasty Warriors Origins releases on January 16, 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC platforms. You can learn more about it in our in-depth review.