Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered - New Bu (Review)
Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered
Released: October 1st, 2026
Developer: Omega Force
Publisher: Tecmo Koei
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch 2, Xbox Series
If I were to discuss the games that defined me, Dynasty Warriors 3 would have to dominate a large chunk of the conversation. It’s the first videogame that felt completely made for me, and the resulting obsession turned an appreciation for the medium into an abiding love that eventually inspired my career choices. Yes, you can in part blame Omega Force for the past twenty years of my bullshit.
Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is my dream proposition. For as much as I love the PS2 original, it’s full of outmoded and often frustrating features, and for the past few years I’ve played a modded ROM just to make it tolerable. I wanted this for years - a modernized, more accessible version of one of my favorite games of all time. However, one can never underestimate the potential for disaster, even with an idea that should be hard to screw up.
The good news is that Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered is mostly really good. There’s only one issue that truly hurts, but it’s a big enough problem to put a significant dent in proceedings.
First and foremost, the remaster is a net positive. Just the fact that attack strings are no longer locked in the direction of the first enemy you touch is a massive victory, binning the most egregious barrier to enjoyment. Other improvements include faster and immediately available horses, a basic checkpoint system (thank fuck), and a healthy collection of little quality-of-life changes. Along with more dramatic alterations, Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered is both more convenient and easier to play - that last point is no bad thing considering how downright unreasonable the PS2 one could be. Some of the most grueling fourth and fifth weapon unlocks are doable now, to the point where combat jobbers like Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi can get theirs with relative ease.
Oh, and I’m really pleased the remaster tells you how to unlock final weapons and special items. Many of the requirements are so obscure that we all needed guides to figure this shit out back in the day, so why not save us the hassle?
By far the biggest new inclusion is a system of defensive measures inspired by Dynasty Warriors: Origins. The dodge maneuver is a massive game changer, a welcome respite from twenty years of unavoidable backstabs and stun locks. Being able to quickly reposition oneself in a fight is good for both evading and closing in on targets, allowing players to sustain their offense and rack up combos far more easily. By dodging or attacking from a block right before an enemy hits, you can cut them off and deliver a fancy counter, though the original game’s combat system obviously isn’t designed for it. It’s fine that it’s there, but I see parrying more as a pleasant surprise than something to rely on in the chaos of a fight, a useful thing that might happen while I’m smashing all my buttons.
Enemies occasionally charge up an unblockable attack, leaving themselves extra vulnerable to your own charge attacks or bow shots. No longer able to pull Musous out of their asses, officers instead telegraph their super moves for a moment, allowing you to parry with a Musou of your own - out of all the counters, this last one is the least advisable, as the damage you’ll do simply isn’t worth wasting your invincible ultimate finisher on. It’s better to just block an incoming Musou and retaliate as soon as the tantrum’s over. Be aware that harder difficulties reduce enemy charge times so quickly you have to predict them if you want to stop them, including unblockables that have also had their damage scaled up. On Chaos difficulty, the whole system’s value prospect plummets.
Archers have been nerfed, no longer able to ignore a target’s defense value, though I think it speaks to their legendary terrorism that they’re still fucking scary. Conversely, the player’s bodyguards are improved, so much better at staying alive without requiring careful stat allocation. Another major defensive boost is the ability to block attacks from all directions rather than just the front, which saves a hell of a lot of aggravation.
Weapons always needed severe retreatment and the remaster gives them exactly that. Stat boosts and elemental effects can now be transferred from one weapon to another, with elements attached to random drops rather than bound to a precious few unlockable ones. What this does for their viability cannot be understated - it’s incredible how bad a lot of 3’s unique weapons were, often coming with stats unsuited to their own moveset. Elements, meanwhile, were only handed out to a few characters at apparent random, and even among the blessed chosen there were ones stuck with borderline incompatible effects.
Fully customizable weapon properties improve the stakes for pretty much everyone on the roster, especially when an element’s married to a move for which it wasn't intended with hilariously imbalanced results. The coveted Steel property, which instakills mobs and deals hefty proportional damage otherwise, can be given to someone who ends their combos with a shockwave to create purple walls of death. Lightning was never as fun in any other Dynasty Warriors as it was in 3, so it’s a genuine joy to spread blue bouncy death as anyone I so please. Fire is something of a fringe case that’s become more appealing now it can be swapped. Wind has always been some sort of weird joke element, so let’s not worry about it.
Almost every one of Remastered’s changes can be switched off to create an experience much closer to the original. While I don’t recommend exposing yourself to the full depths of vanilla DW3’s bullshit, it’s a really nice touch to offer those old features. Either way, this isn’t a fully faithful recreation of the original and it’s fairly obvious when you see it in motion (especially when it comes to mob AI, which can go a bit eccentric). For the most part it’s not a problem, but there’s one deviation that can neither be deactivated nor ignored - the original game’s collision physics are completely absent.
One of the coolest aspects of Dynasty Warriors 3 is the knockback effect you create when bashing character models into each other, which would set off little domino chains of flying soldiers. While present in other installments, the feature was wonderful in DW3, delivering a delightfully chunky impact that felt like it hurt every single time. There are movesets built around this entire mechanic, relying on narrow attacks to play snooker with enemies, and the removal of collision has royally fucked over their already limited playstyles. Annoyingly, in-game tooltips still claim these attacks do what they used to, which just isn’t true. They don’t even deal scratch damage, there’s zero interaction between models.
It’s a gigantic shame that such a core part of the combat has gone missing, stripping an entire attack chain of its point and leaving a tangible hole in the way combat feels. Apparently the developer couldn’t recreate the old physics or something, but justifications are neither here nor there when assessing products sold on authenticity.
All the visuals have been redone with varying degrees of success. I like the playable character models, their redesigns maintain the general aesthetic of the originals while adding a bit of extra flourish. NPC officers aren’t as good, having been made far less distinct by the removal of features like the strategist model’s beard. Weapon effects are a mixed bag unto themselves - the visual slipstream accompanying attacks is really pretty, but certain AoE effects, such as those of Pang Tong or Zhenji, have lost a lot of their visual definition to appear more realistic or something, making them look and feel far less cool. Everyone’s animations are mostly fine, but some of the cutscenes and victory screens are less charming as a result of getting subtle and understated movements.
Audio is thankfully on point, with the masterwork voice acting of Dynasty Warriors 3 fully preserved… at least once you go into the settings to change which version of English you get. By default, combat grunts and associated lines are sloppily replaced to fix the “problem” of DW3 having not localized Japan’s sound effects. Since they were never going to track down the original cast, let alone pay for new recordings, Omega Force used sounds from more recent Dynasty Warriors games. Turns out it's way more dissonant when characters speak one language with two distinctly different voices, and the clips being used are terrible - Zhang He repeats the line “such elegance” every single fucking time you start attacking, which becomes maddening after less than a fucking minute.
Terrible idea to make it the default setting (terrible idea to make it at all), but at least you can change it.
For a bit of freshness, Remastered adds developer’s pet Ziluan from Origins. He's a pretty fun play, and of course he's got an extravagantly lethal moveset because he's so special and great and cool. Three maps that were once only available via a few characters' story modes have been added to Free Mode, which means a whole bunch of officer-specific cutscenes are now accessible in-game instead of just YouTube. I miss the old Dynasty Warriors tradition of unique character scenes, so I really appreciate the restoration of ones left on the cutting room floor.
There’s so much more I could rattle on about if I really got into the weeds, but a novella on this topic would bore us all to tears. Dynasty Warriors 3 isn’t my favorite game of all time, but it’s nonetheless my game of all time - the one I know better than any other - and I keenly feel every change made to it both for better and worse. However faithful a recreation this version may or may not be, I’ve worn the stick on my controller since I started playing it, staying up until unwise times to grind out another officer or hunt for unique weapons. Basically, I’ve been acting pretty much how I act whenever I get back into Dynasty Warriors 3, so in that sense I can say it’s doing something right.
Even with the glaring absence of its classic collision physics, I can’t say I haven’t had a great time revisiting a game that means a lot to me, especially with the many changes that are genuinely welcome.
I’m glad this exists.
8/10
