Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered Game Review

Relive the dramatic battles of the Three Kingdoms era in this remaster of one of the most iconic games in the Dynasty Warriors franchise. Lead over 40 officers into battle where history and legend collide. Determine the fate of the three kingdoms as you face hordes of enemy soldiers in the grand tradition of the musou series.

Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered is published and developed by Koei Tecmo Games Company. It is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC/Steam, and Nintendo Switch 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 code was provided for the purposes of this review.

Relive the dramatic battles of the Three Kingdoms era in this remaster of one of the most iconic games in the Dynasty Warriors franchise. Lead over 40 officers into battle where history and legend collide. Determine the fate of the three kingdoms as you face hordes of enemy soldiers in the grand tradition of the musou series.

Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered is published and developed by Koei Tecmo Games Company. It is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC/Steam, and Nintendo Switch 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 code was provided for the purposes of this review.

Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered is so good at doing what it sets out to do; I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

The original Dynasty Warriors 3 was a certified classic. That game did well with the larger gaming public, but perhaps most importantly it went triple platinum in my house. Huge hordes of enemies on screen (for 2001 anyway), a sense of unparalleled scale, and two-player couch co-op made for a highly addictive way to wear out controllers. We mashed our way through the Three Kingdoms side by side, howling with laughter at the cutscenes and roaring with anger when enemy generals juggled us halfway across the map. Chips, soda, good friends, and hordes of enemy soldiers—ah, has it really been 25 years already? It feels like just yesterday.

A lot has changed in those intervening years. In the 25 years since the release of the original Dynasty Warriors 3, dozens upon dozens of musou titles have been released. The two primary pillars of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors alone have numerous entries at this point, and that's to say nothing of the various tie-ins and spinoffs. If you have ever seen a grouping of a dozen or more enemies in nearly any setting over the last two decades, there is a good chance the folks at KOEI-Tecmo have given you an opportunity to slash your way through them. There is even the macro-layer strategy brought in by the Empires titles, a whole other sub-franchise running in parallel to these mainline games. This has led to a great deal of iteration and variation of the mechanical complexity within the franchise, providing everything from only-slightly-above-historical-expectations heroism that sees a dozen men felled in a daring combat to full-blown superheroic power fantasies featuring fearsome generals zipping around the battlefield and bowling over entire armies in their wake.

All this has created quite the curious state of affairs. Somehow, Warriors games are simultaneously a uniquely singular experience that no other series has even attempted to imitate, yet paradoxically highly varied to the point where some entries might as well be completely alien to others within the family tree. Dynasty Warriors 3 was so long ago, and so much has changed without fundamentally changing—that it might beggar the mind to even consider a remaster in the first place.

Yet the game never lacked the sense of something greater going on. I'll be honest, as young gamers in the 2000s American South, we had very little understanding of the historical background for the tales being told. I didn't pick Xiahou Dun because I had a deep investment in the historical simulation; I chose him because he had a big sword and a cool eyepatch. While my understanding of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has grown tremendously in the years since, the core appeal of Dynasty Warriors 3 has remained in this remastered package.

The premise is exactly what you have come to know and expect. The game has a number of modes, following various officers through a selection of battles across the Three Kingdoms era. You will control an officer and mash your way through enemy soldiers with a selection of light attacks, heavy attacks, bow shots, and supercharged musou moves. There is some variety in use cases depending on weapon length, certain combo strings, and a few odds and ends, but largely the gameplay is the same regardless of your path. You will engage enemy soldiers on the battlefield with predetermined conditions for the battle (usually winning by defeating a particular hero and losing if your own allied NPC commander is killed), and inevitably those conditions will shift as new developments occur. Most of the general gameplay involves fighting hordes of lesser troops and their more powerful officers in duels of various sizes while your own armies run around pushing back as well. Officer dialogue keeps you abreast of what's happening, while cutscenes will occasionally break in to show off more dramatic scenes such as surprising attacks, notable officer arrivals, or magic.

The game has a selection of different modes to try. There is the standard musou campaign mode where you lead officers through their chain of battles, levelling them up over time. But there are also free battles where you can take those officers into the maps and play them over again, levelling up their abilities either just for fun or to improve your stats and get past a challenging story mission. There are also challenges, co-op play, and more, but all boil down to mass battles where your officer is the deciding factor.

Perhaps most importantly is the nature of the difficulty. I got something of a reality check when I jumped back into the game, set it on hard, and actually had to focus to make sure I was winning. I had forgotten how prickly Dynasty Warriors 3 (and many of the older musou titles) could be, and how ruthless the battles could get. Sure, there are challenges in the modern games too, but there is a different flavor to the difficulty that can be hard to quantify. Dynasty Warriors 3 Remaster retains what I can only describe as the absolute nonsense enemies can get away with. The run-of-the-mill soldiers are nowhere near as passive as their reputation might indicate, as they will gladly jump in and jab you a few times to interrupt a crucial combo or whittle your health at the wrong moment. Enemy officers will juggle you for three quarters of your health if they catch you unaware or outnumbered. And don't get me started on those enemy archers…

The items in particular play a key role in how Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered feels. Items that drop come in broadly three varieties: temporary buffs, permanent buffs, and odd supplies. The temporary buffs are quite common and are usually things like 30 seconds of double attack or armor, or an auto-refill on your musou gauge. The permanent buffs are much smaller, +1 attack here or +2 defense there. The odds and ends are often more arrows, but are just as important as not having them versus having them changes your approach to some situations. What's interesting is that items do not disappear on any sort of timer. They sit around waiting to be picked up. At first, it seems like the permanent buffs are the most helpful—and long term they are—so it can be annoying to get yet another 30 seconds of times two power. But as the missions ramp up in difficulty, you realize how you need those extra bursts of power or defense to get through tougher sections, and in fact need to get a steady stream of temporary and permanent buffs throughout the level, carefully saving your temporary pickups for when you need them most. And because you can't carry them or hoard them in any way, you are forced to remember their location on the map for when you can race off on horseback to grab them, then come back and make a difference. The permanent buffs add up over the course of a campaign, but it is often the temporary buffs that make the difference when fighting the absurd unfairness of the game's core mechanics (particularly multiple officers and/or higher-level officers).

Perhaps most importantly: this game has local/couch co-op. It is an often overlooked feature these days, but being able to sit down with friends and mash your way through hordes of enemies was a huge part of the original game's appeal. This feature alone is what made Dynasty Warriors 3 such a huge hit, even if Dynasty Warriors 2 “technically” did the shape of the genre first. I am so glad to see that this Remaster keeps this functionality, as many other venerable co-op franchises have abandoned it for heartbreaking (if understandable) reasons. In fact, you're only getting part of the experience if you play this by yourself, not an inadequate one, but certainly a diminished one. If possible, find someone who will sit down and play this with you on the same TV, and you'll realize the unfettered joy from facing down hordes of soldiers back-to-back with a good friend. That first time you do a combo-musou attack is magical, truly magical.

There have been new additions as well. Most of these are options and quality-of-life features. Perhaps most prominent is the replay feature, where after a loss you are not forced to simply restart the entire level but can instead choose to jump back to a few quick-saved moments from your battle, possibly saving tons of time on the longer missions. There are also a few modifications to things like the weapon forging system, which, to my knowledge, appears brand new, and it allows you to make use of the otherwise uninteresting new weapon drops that might have cluttered your inventory.

All of this blends to create a very satisfyingly challenging gameplay. Yes, your options are quite simple. A few strikes, blocking, an occasional super move, maybe arrows in a pinch, and fleeing on horseback, but the resource management turns repetition into an ever-evolving minigame. You must be constantly considering what resources you have on your person, what enemy density is compared to friendlies in the area, how to approach to minimize the amount of officers you face at once, what your current resources are, where you left useful resources on the map, and where you might find new resources should the need arise. It's direct, it's engaging, and man, is it satisfying.

For those who have only experienced the modern titles, know that I enjoy those too, but there's a lot worth exploring here if you've never tried it. For comparison, there is a lot of fun to be found in the modern titles (especially as I have just come off completing Origins myself). The difference is how the impact of scale feels. These more recent titles have really upped the scale of the power fantasy—you are slaying hundreds, even thousands of soldiers in a single map. You are blasting through blobs of enemy soldiers and howling with laughter as they billow away from your unstoppable attacks. Enemy generals are massive targets that often require particular attack types to overcome or building up complex meter changes to whittle their health down over time. It is far grander than something like Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered, and that's not a bad thing.

There is a great appeal to what is on offer here. By way of comparison, I would say that modern Warriors titles are as difficult as stirring a large pot as fast as you can without spilling over the sides. The liquid you are stirring isn't the primary obstacle; the stirring is easy, after all, but the challenge comes from managing the chaotic forces you are shifting to keep it from spiraling out of control or losing track of time while cooking. Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered pulls from an older sense of challenge, sort of like trying to peel a sticker off a package without ruining it. If you just try to rip the sticker straight off, you tear the box or leave behind all that cruddy adhesive bits. Instead, you have to pull slowly yet firmly, picking at this side then that corner, carefully working it until the whole thing pops off in one satisfying chunk. Careful preparation and sensing out where the give and take are make it look easy, while the truth is you worked hard to make it all go off without a hitch.

That said, it is a beautifully done remaster that recaptures the feel of the older games and preserves that in the modern era. For the suggested MSRP of US$39.99 without any additional DLC required, there's a more than reasonable amount to do and enjoy across the dozens of officer stories and hours of gaming to be had. Its price reflects its ambitions and success; reasonable. Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete Edition Remastered is a faithful reimplementation of a beloved game that holds plenty of nostalgia for gray-haired veterans like myself, and a fresh opportunity for younger fans to explore the series' origins with a fresh coat of paint. The only real challenge you might have in getting your full money's worth is whether you and a close friend can line up your schedules to play on the couch