Advice for Unlocking All the Stages

[VictorX]

There's the main campaign, which are stages that flow from one to another. About halfway through the main story campaigns they will branch off into Hypothetical Ending and Historical Ending.

By fulfilling a bunch of hidden objectives in the first half of story campaign you can unlock the Hypothetical route AKA the Happy Ending.

You can find the guide for unlocking the hypothetical route for WEI, WU, SHU, and JIN here:
http://s13.zetaboards.com/koeiwarriors/topic/7080371/1/

You can find Lu Bu guide (less comprehensive, more figure-it-out-yourself) here:
http://koei.wikia.com/wiki/Dynasty_Warriors_8/Story_Mode#Lu_Bu_Story_Mode

Also, failing at some of those objectives or doing other side objectives might give you side stages that branch off of the main story campaign for one stage.

The bottom row of stages are Xtreme Legend stages, and are not part of the main story campaign. You unlock them by playing them IN STORY MODE, not in Free mode. Beating one unlocks the next, but there's no cutscenes. They do help fill in the gaps in the main story by providing extra stuff.

I hope this saves people some time, as I spent a bit searching up how this whole system worked.

[RX-0Banshee]

This will also help:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/728614-shin-sangoku-musou-7-with-moushouden/faqs/67701

[Asane]

Answered one of my random questions on what the bottom missions were, havent had playtime to toss into the XL stuff yet.