Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered Review

For over two decades, Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors has certainly lived up to its, well, “dynasty”: it’s fathered eight mainline titles, and the hack-and-slash series went on to raise a whole family tree of sub-series (Samurai Warriors), licensed spin-offs (One Piece, Dragon Quest, etc.) and crossovers (Warriors Orochi). All follow the same script: you enlist one character from their colossal rosters, plop ‘em into crowds of enemy soldiers, and go to town as a one-man army, weaving combo after combo to send hordes of combatants flying like they’re balls in a lottery machine. It has all the fireworks of a mindless stress reliever, but ardent fans are quick to argue that Warriors games are moreso an exercise in stress management: you’re constantly maintaining the tide of battle, dividing time by capturing and defending bases while fending off constant threats and clearing whatever objective demands your attention.

Hence my uneven feelings on Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered. I’m told the PlayStation 2 original’s something of a fan-favorite, yet the game’s clearly from an era where Koei Tecmo was still deducing how to straddle that line between strategy and button-mashing. It’s not for a lack of trying—aside from snazzy new graphics, this remaster updates the game with modern Dynasty Warriors mechanics amidst a variety of quality-of-life features. Yet despite how that’s all naturally woven into the game’s balance, it’s hard not to compare and contrast with further strides made in evolving the series.

Based on the famous Chinese tale Romance of the Three Kingdoms (in itself historical fiction covering the fall of the Han dynasty), Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered presents a veritable toy chest of historical figures to play with—one of them being exclusive to this remaster: Zilulan, the original protagonist of Dynasty Warriors: Origins. (Only playable in Free/Challenge Mode, alas. Try also not to mind the fellow’s visual mismatch). Armed with swords, spears, clubs, fans, and what have you, all characters star in their personalized “Musou” campaigns: reenacted battles from both the novel and Chinese history. Maps and cutscenes are often recycled to accommodate each warrior, but the game takes care to apply their respective factions; for instance, your bases and starting point on the map depends on whether you’re fighting under the banner of Cao Cao, Liu Bei or Sun Jian.

The roster's 40+ warriors may share some combos–as is expected with a roster of that size–but there's enough weapon variety to keep players occupied. The elegant Sun Shangxiang prances and dances about with her chakrams, while the roly-poly Xu Zhu smashes enemies into paste with his mace. (No, really, watch those HP bars melt.) I found myself drawn to Zhang He: an overdramatic Vega wannabe whose claws slice and drill through windswept crowds. (Pro tip: disregard the bow—the button set-up’s all funky and you can just knock off cavalry units with aerials.)

You know what I wasn’t expecting walking into Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered, though? The game being this hard; like, “enemy infantry will juggle you like a round of Hot Potato”, hard. Oftentimes, Warriors’ crowds of small fry are mere practice dummies waiting for you to whale on them; here, they’re dens of hungry piranhas waiting for their next meal. (Those archers are bloodthirsty, man.) It’s the game’s way of telling you not to simply rush at the enemy commander, so you eventually realize it’s not just about clearing crowds for the sake of it—you’re mowing down enemies to pull your equally-ruthless infantry ahead so they can overwhelm whatever enemy officer impedes your path. 

To clarify, it’s a welcome surprise: the difficulty of modern Warriors largely stems from mismanagement, as you’re more likely to fail out of carelessness rather than falling in combat. (Ever had the enemy capture your home base because you got lost in the combo zone? Yeah.) In Dynasty Warriors 3, your role as commander has you fighting a careful war of attrition, constantly devising new methods of approach and gaining ground inch by inch. Not an easy task, mind; bosses nearing death will bat you away in a last-ditch effort to heal—a new point of friction, I’m told, one only overcome through the bonds of teamwork. (One would do well to heed the movement of their appointed bodyguards—those dual Musou specials are certain to get you out of a pinch.)

Indeed, several mechanics have been imported directly from Dynasty Warriors: Origins to spice things up. New dodge and perfect guard techniques provide some much-needed defensive options, rewarding players with counterattacks to knock enemy officers on their rear. Said officers now glow when charging their attacks, signaling when to interrupt with a charge/special attack of your own. Veterans desiring a more faithful Dynasty Warriors 3 experience can simply switch to “Classic” settings in the options, but speaking as a newbie, I’d be hard-pressed to do so with how flawlessly their teaching tools situate themselves into the game’s push-and-pull. Truth be told, I would’ve thought something as basic as dodging would’ve been part-and-parcel with the original game. (While I’m at it, color me surprised about the newly-implemented Weapon Fusion, too—combining weapons and attributes into my ideal tool of war serves as a frequent, natural reward from a hard-won bout.)

Still, a remaster can only touch up so much, and Dynasty Warriors 3’s weaknesses readily surface; the map objectives, for one. The game might occasionally shake things up by having you chase down Meng Huo or navigating a fortress maze, but really, there’s little mission variety beyond “beat up tons of guys to advance”. Stuff is certainly happening, yes, but the lack of readability means I’m often given no reason to care. For instance, one scenario has a commander summoning the power of wind—a grandiose display serving absolutely no discernable purpose. Meanwhile, the enemy army might set fire to a battalion of traversable ships; surely a cause for alarm, yet my warrior walks through the flames unabated. That’s not how hazards work. Future Warriors games wouldn’t just take greater care in conveying their raising stakes: they’d serve a more balanced diet of war game objectives to keep players engaged.

Character growth also feels antiquated—there are no combo strings to unlock, nor does beating enemies earn EXP to level up; well, technically you do, but it’s all funneled into so-called “Merit”: a meter rewarding you with riding high-grade horses. This is not as exciting as it sounds: while horseback riding is a convenient method of travel, the thrill of trampling crowds quickly dulls with how often you’ll get knocked off. More unconventionally, you instead raise your stats by picking up various items across the battlefield; an amulet for increasing three attack points here, a scroll granting two speed points there, and so on. While I was never compelled to farm for stats, it’s an awful lot of busy work in contrast to the immediately-understood concept of “beat enemies = get stronger”. Yet another work in progress.

More peripheral features fail to impress. There’s a whole Challenge Mode complete with the extra activities from the Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends expansion (Rush, Meteor, Assault, and Unification), but none prove very interesting. Time Attack and Endurance may be subtle tutorials to learn the ins-and-outs of each warrior, but I can’t say I found it enlightening to, say, hunt down incremental packs of soldiers for the former. I’m particularly confounded by Rush, which employs a “race to the finish” model by having you dash by horseback to the other side of the map, but I kept getting shot by arrows and died nearly instantly. I’m not sure what I question more: the nebulous purpose of such an exercise, or the fine print etched into the archers’ Satanic pact. 

Still, it’s evident this remaster was no rushjob, and what better example than the graphical facelift? Running on Unreal Engine 5, Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered strikes an interesting balance in upping the realism through its roster of fighters, lush environments or re-rendered cutscenes while retaining PlayStation 2-esque resolution/polygon count in everything from enemy soldiers to out-of-the-way rock formations. Melding two generations of gaming together may make for a stylized approach, but it’s a look not everyone will be on board with: the realism centers around what draws the player’s eye (the playable character; the surrounding scenery), but cracks show in distracting 2D sprites (courtesy of enemy flagbearers waving their low FPS banners into the camera) to soldiers’ faces reduced to blank boards. The question of whether the graphics were best preserved in their original form is one best answered by veterans, but however you feel about it, it’ll take a moment to adjust. (Humorously, you can costume the characters with PS2-era character models; actually, one of the screenshots here showcases just that. Can you find it?)

Hence my warning for prospective Switch 2 buyers: do not play this game on handheld. While docked runs fine thanks to reduced detail (there’s less foliage than on PlayStation 5, for instance), poor Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered was clearly not optimized for handheld play—framerate hitches frequently interrupt what’s already a woefully blurry display, and NPCs may well have time-traveled from a pre-rendered 90’s PC game with all their jerky flipbook movement. I can’t speak to whether the long loading times are a Switch 2 problem as well, but it’s little wonder the Switch version was cancelled considering its lagging performance. Heed the following screenshots well (and this video; bring safety goggles), for you may want to consider another platform. (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Steam, for those curious.)

Not that the return of the infamous English VA wouldn’t have immediately dated it, otherwise. Brought back by popular demand, every line is delivered with all the urgency of water cooler talk at the office, be it the butchered Chinese pronunciations (Cao Cao being “cow cow,” not the correct “tsao tsao”), or sloppily-repurposed cutscenes having characters talking past each other with unintentional nonsense (“The supply depot? How did they find it?” “Yes.”) It’s low-quality dubbing typical of the time’s lower standards, yet there’s a charm to this trainwreck that I simply can’t deny—mainly in how none of the “actors” involved simply do not care, right down to the moans of pain emitted as if one dropped their change beneath the soda machine. (I tell ya, Susan at the clerk desk’s performance as Sun Shangxiang was robbed at the Oscars.)

The hilarity’s almost enough to excuse the piecemeal storylines: for all the rich legacy borrowed from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the cutscenes are all half-minute non-sequiturs providing only the barest of pretext, failing to give any motivation or background into who all these mooks are. Regardless, if you’re not in the mood for bad VA, you can enjoy the original Japanese voices or the re-recorded Chinese dialogue; really, what better historical accuracy than the latter?

It’s an odd beast, Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered. For all the rust creeping beneath, the game continues its hypnosis, leaving me stuck in an endless trance of mindless brawling. Maybe it’s “so bad they’re good” cinematics and voiceover, and the morbid curiosity that entails. Maybe it’s the unnatural difficulty alien to my typical Warriors experience, and how I’d like to see more of that today. Maybe the gameplay touch-ups made it just palatable enough to engage today, taking a dated classic and turning into something resembling a modern Warriors, warts and all. Yes, that’s probably it: if that’s the key to retooling the sequential PS2 follow-ups—and, in turn, getting me me into the mainline series proper—then refurbishing this historical relic may well have proven a fine stepping stone.