Age of Mythology: Retold's Japanese mythology-focused expansion just announced it's hitting this fall

Ah geez. Bad news, everyone. Someone went and unlocked the Heavenly Spear, unleashing a hundred years of war on the land and its people. Also there's a lady who is also a spider, and she's pretty keen on getting her hands on it and seems pretty evil? It's all just going from bad to worse.

Such is my takeaway from the Xbox Games Showcase trailer for Age of Mythology: Retold's Heavenly Spear expansion, which focuses on Japanese mythology and just announced it's coming out this autumn.

This one's bringing "an all-new Japanese pantheon to Age of Mythology: Retold, introducing 12 new gods, each with unique god powers, divine technologies, and myth units drawn from centuries of legend". Which is probably good. I bet those are all good things to have if you're locked in a war to the death with enemy divine powers.

Heavenly Spear also pledges a whole new campaign. Brace yourself for 12 missions about Yasuko, "a humble farmer’s daughter who discovers a magical spear and is swept into a mythic war". She's up against that spider lady, too, as well as the "power-hungry warlord" Kagemasa. That is before she graduates to taking on "the monstrous Yamata no Orochi, the Titan of the Japanese Pantheon".

Which is a lot to put on a farm-girl's shoulders, but I guess she does have that new spear to help her along. Also helping her: new units, like Kitsune foxes, Jorogumo spiders, and club-wielding Oni. Plus samurai and shinobi, as is presumably mandated somewhere in law for people making games about Japanese mythology.

I'm into it, and I wonder if the devs will take bigger swings with a brand-new expansion than they did with the base game. Maybe the old-school charm of the original's clunky cutscenes might give way to something slicker when Heavenly Spear hits this autumn?