Dynasty Warriors 3 is a step in the right direction, but it still has too many issues for me to recommend it. While I acknowledge that it's a vast improvement from the previous game, the gameplay loop is just not good enough for me.

The graphics and music are way better than those of Dynasty Warriors 2. The music from 2 is reused sometimes and so are some of the levels, but Dynasty Warriors 3 has a new layout for all recurring levels, and it also includes completely new stages like the Nanman campaign, plus some new, exciting music tracks.

The combat is also improved. The combo system has more options now, and new attacks are unlocked as you play. You can also ride elephants now. But my favorite addition is that commanders no longer heal when you know them down!

That said, the storytelling is still not compelling. I feel like the game is definitely made first and foremost for fans of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The cutscenes are better than in the previous game, and there are also more of them, but I still felt lost when trying to piece together the story. The game would greatly benefit from a better storytelling, explaining who the characters are and the relationships between them.

The most annoying thing in this game is that archers are too powerful. Sometimes they overpower you and kill you very quickly, without giving you a chance to defend yourself. It feels unfair. While you can now save anywhere in a stage, I feel like I should be able to overpower enemies with my skills. Instead it feels like, at certain points in the game, if I'm low on health, then I'm dead.

Without a compelling story or a more interesting gameplay loop, I can't really recommend this game. It's a step in the right direction for sure, and the franchise has potential, but there is still some way to go before the games in this franchise can be called "good".

I always hear people online like Totalbiscuit and Jim Sterling talking about how much they love Dynasty Warriors, so it's always made me wanna try them. I looked up some stuff about them, and 3 seemed to be a pretty good place to start, other than just buying the most recent game in the series (which seemed to be the actually most common recommendation). There was much frustration at losings, and this game certainly has its problems, but I actually had quite a lot of fun with it :) . For reference, I played through as the Wei Empire as Dian Wei.

We're gonna start off with my problems with the game, for no particular reason. First off, I'd imagine that most people who've played more recent 3rd person action games are going to take big issue with the camera, and rightfully so. The camera really feels too zoomed in sometimes, and the ONLY way to reposition it is to hit the L button, but that's also your jumping recovery button, so often, you're just SOL and gotta deal with fighting towards the camera (the R-stick literally does nothing for some reason O.o ). Other technical problems include the fact that even though the draw distance isn't huge, I very often ran into problems where not every soldier actually present at my location wasn't being shown because of hardware limitations. This wasn't usually a problem, as their is a radar you can change to be either map-wide or just a local area, and using the radar to get a better idea of how many soldiers are actually around you is a good tip. That radar is especially good for tracking when enemy generals and officers are near, as they appear as white dots that blink red, which is only confusing because friendly officers also appear as white dots, but ones that blink blue :/

The control issues don't really stop there, but not for technical reasons. For a game that is not only a sequel to a very similar game but also a game that came out in 2002, this game does an inexcusable job of telling you how to play: It doesn't tell you jack shit. In my stubbornness, I refused to look at the manual and basically just spent the first hour or so of the game just getting a handle on how to actually play. Now, the actual controls aren't that hard to figure out, but its the overarching game strategies that will likely take you longer to figure out.

You level up as you kill soldiers, and if you kill more, you'll get stronger. You can also get straight up stat buffs from killing enemy generals, officers, and gate guardians, as well as new weapons and passive items to equip. Now, even though it numerically shows your EXP-gain from killing mans at the end of battle, (I'm like 99% sure) you actually do get stronger in real time, but there's no way to really know that other than the fact that you'll notice you're killing enemies quicker, or not getting staggered as much. Additionally, at first, the battles really feel like there's a sense of urgency to them, as you get notifications like, "X-general's troop is in trouble!" which will constantly make you think you're losing. However, there are hard time limits on battles, with fairly easy to understand win/lose conditions, so generally, you want to kill as many enemy soldiers, officers, etc. to level up as much as possible, because otherwise you just will not be strong enough to do the later missions, some of which do require some element of speed.

Now onto what I really love about this game, and that's the style, concept, and gameplay. The whole concept and style of the game is that you're fighting the on-foot battles of what would be larger strategic affairs in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms setting. As a result, though it takes a little while to get used to, there's just something so satisfying about fighting a massive battle with thousands of troops as just one uber-troop on the field. The strategy that you have to develop after (usually) several tries at a map, based on which allied NPC's tend to start having trouble and where, and how best to hit up all of the enemy generals in the most advantageous situations. For a game about mostly just mashing the X-button, there's a lot more strategy involved than I first thought.

The combat also has a surprising amount of nuance to it. Though you'll be initially expecting that the best way to go forward, is just to mash the x-button like crazy. But not mashing it so fast won't go through your entire combo and makes it so your down-time before you can attack again is much lesser, meaning you can keep on top of a blocking opponent much harder (I don't believe there's any way for the player to block attacks, at least not that I could suss out. It's a bit like God Hand in that way). Additionally, you also have your Musou (warrior) attack, which is one you can activate once you build up the Musou gauge by striking enemy soldiers. Your Musou attack breaks you out of staggers, and almost always has some crowd-clearing element, so fighting generals in a sea of their own troops to keep your Musou gauge topped up can actually be a legitimate strategy. There's also a charge attack of some sort, but I never actually figured out how to use it effectively, so I'll refrain from commenting on it. I certainly know the enemy knows how to use it though! They beat my face in with it a whoooole lot Xp

The last bit that I love is the setting and style, which this game is just oozing with. It's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so it's based on real events that took place after the fall of Han China. For a history nerd like me, this stuff is sooo cool. Being real generals and fighting hand to hand (admittedly in a very unrealistic and exaggerated fashion, but still) in real places is just such a cool thing to me. The game's graphics are okay for an Xbox game with a scale like this. The most important thing is that the generals look pretty darn good, and the use of a color palatte in their design is also well used, so nothing (other than the ground textures) is too hideous to look at.

Verdict: Somewhat recommended. As my lengthy problems section trys to get across, this game has a lot of problems, which make it difficult to objectively recommend across the board. However, as a fan of action games and historical fiction games, I enjoyed this game to pieces, and if you are as well, then I think you'll likely get at least some enjoyment out of it. And if this game's mechanics are too obtuse, then trying one of the more recent entries which are just as cheap is also a safe option :)

This rating hurts me because mechanically speaking Dynasty Warriors 3 is better than 2 in every way. Aerial recoveries, equipment, new combos, the beautiful voice acting, and enemy commanders using their gameshark codes in much greater moderation go a long way and make the game feel great to play, and the large increase in content is good too, but jesus christ at least on the campaign I picked the level design is just absolutely abysmal.
One level required me to run across its infuriating layout several times to kill a continuously respawning commander which probably made up 80% of its length for example, every level has an absurd amount of tower archers that are impossible to deal with because of how shitty the bow is and how specific the angle they need to be shot from is, and this last one might be a skill issue but I regularly just didn't have any soldiers to push through packed areas since major threats that need dealing with are always across the map forcing me to leave them to their deaths, so I just had to cheese those pushes in slow and boring ways. On top of this the difficulty seems to ramp up just as fast as usual, so I'm dealing with all this garbage on top of having to grind to keep up.
Everyone else seems to love this game so maybe I'm skill issued or maybe the other levels are better, but I just got ridiculously frustrated and couldn't bring myself to keep playing after a certain point.

It's difficult to choose between this and 5 for the best DW game, but very easy for me choose when it comes to personal fave.

This one strikes i think the best balance in terms of difficulty, gameplay, visual style out of all the DW games.

DW2 gave us the basic building blocks, but was insanely difficult due to the limtations on your character, no weapons, no items, and your movelist was virtually identical to the foes you faced.

DW3 adds layers onto this, but doesn't crank the difficulty down too much the way that future installments do. This is still a challenging game, but the balance is just right, enemies are capable of all the things you are, but they don't have the extra moves, the fancier weapons or the item loadouts.

All the characters are given their own unique movesets, final weapons, voice overs, and there's 41 characters to play as, and 13 of these are new ones, although they may as well all be new characters considering how basic the 2nd games moveslists were.

OST is one of the best, and is a perfect match for the arcadey action, and really does a great job of matching events in game, and encouraging you on, or demoralising you in the face of a challenge.

The only weaknesses i see, are the voice over, the storytelling, and debateably the fog. Personally, i write off the fog, as it's most likely a limitation of the hardware. As for the story and voice over, it's pretty bad, but it's extremely funny, it's kind of so bad that it almost comes all the way down to being amazing again.

This is the template i hope future warriors titles try for, this gameplay style, take away some of the overt-anime inspirations, ground the designs a little, power up the enemies to be more than filler.

Second game for the Dynasty Warriors franchise and this is where the series really found its footing. While Dynasty Warriors 2 was fun, it had some deep flaws. This game patches a lot of that up with gusto. First was the addition of more overall content. Eleven new characters (technically 13 but i'll talk about that later) fill out the roster to match a greatly expanded Musou mode which filled in a lot of moments missing from the original game, helping to make the story as a whole feel more rounded and complete.

On top of that are a few RPG-lite mechanics, levelling characters up through item drops and from equipping items that are found. Its a basic mechanic and while the original had some of these elements, it does build to having the game feel more rounded. Expanded character movesets are now also present and some defensive options are now in such as Somersault recoveries.

The game is still brutal though at times. Enemies are VERY aggressive in this game but thankfully the additions of items and recovery options make things much easier to deal with in the past. Its still tough but its a lot more doable than before.

That said, the game isn't without its downsides. While combat as a whole isn't anywhere as unfair as the previous game could be, the same cant be said for some of the ally objectives. There's many a moment where the game will cry out things like 'Liu Bei is in Danger' and then less than 5 seconds later you suddenly get a game over because Liu Bei died before you had a chance to react. This is a problem in a fair few Warriors games but here it feels worse because the levels as a whole are sometimes HUGE... Unreasonably so at times. Levels can take forever and a day to get through (thank goodness for the mid-level save option).

To sum it up - this is a marked improvement over the first game... Just be sure to keep an eye on allies, lest they go all Leeroy Jenkins on you.

One of the first game's I ever played and pretty much a pillar of not only my childhood, but my life. I know people complain about the "clone" movesets and although a lot of the weapons have the same base combos, they do have little subtle differences in there that separate them all from each other.

When I was young, I used to have trouble completing some of the later stages but after returning to it later I have nearly completed it 100%. I have 4 or 5 4th weapons to unlock and that's me but they are the harder weapons to get.

I much prefer this over Dynasty Warriors 4 as I prefer the character design, stage design and music. I love the general gameplay loop of this game over Dw4 too as Dw4 although harder, doesn't always necessarily play fair. Often times, you may jump and the enemies will all jump with you and hit you. Jump charge attacks become pointless as a result.

The AI is aggressive and if you're not careful you may find yourself in a tough spot (Liu Bei's 4th weapon you'll likely be the only person alive 5 minutes in for example) but if you know what you're doing then you do have a chance of not taking on the final officers alone.

The voice actors, although cheesy and bad, it's the good kind of bad. Where as Dw4 I don't think a lot of them are bad in a good way. I think they're just bad. Also these actors have provided some of the most iconic deliveries in all of this series. I could write for hours about this game but there are so many reasons why it is among my favourite ever games that I simply cannot explain in a single review.

Three wasn't my first musou, so it will never have the same weight to me as it does for a lot of other people in the fan base. I respect it a lot for what it did, as another reviewer here noted, this built the house that is modern Koei. The foundation for every successive game in this franchise in genre is right here. And it is pretty fun, at times. There's just the right balance of aggression and pressure to make matches interesting, but maps are just way too big, and way too copy pasted among characters that aren't differentiated enough in this entry to maintain interest after you've done a couple of musou mode runs. The foundation here though, is so good

its insane how much was improved from 2 to 3 in just one year between them

that being said this game as fun as it is gets to bullshit levels of difficulty even on EASY mode its kinda unfortunate

i think the reason you'd wanna go back to this game is for the funny voice acting

Christmas 2002
A Sears in a shopping mall, late night

In the full spirit of christmas shopping at the time while my parents were looking at clothes in a different section, I went alone to the electronics section to head to the video games kiosks to alleviate the boredom since my GameBoy Advance was completely out of battery. Only one of the kiosks were actually on and it was playing a copy of Dynasty Warriors 3 or at least that's what the demo disc loaded if it was one. I think the notion of mowing down a huge amount of soldiers was something of a brand new notion of fun for me growing up mostly playing Pokemon mostly before that point. The funniest part about this is that despite playing 3 and 4 in some way, I only ended up getting the Xtreme Legends variant and nothing else which is essentially only 10% of the game itself. My own chagrin is that I never played the original versions of these or the combination of the two until this point.

I truly feel like Dynasty Warriors 3 took a huge leap for the series and brought it into some prominance going forward. If Dynasty Warriors 2 built the foundation, Dynasty Warriors 3 built the whole goddamn house. Where do I even begin with what was added? I won't even go into the Xtreme Legends content either and there's still so much. Four weapons for each character (five with Xtreme Legends) that enhance your moveset to a whopping six chain with stats to roll for. A brand new item system that brings more customization and variety into including special effects, stat boosts and the ability to bring Red Hare into battle. Way more characters with their own musou mode each. A plethora of game modes to boot and more events and stages that further flesh out the three kingdom eras. Going into every minute detail would be an extremely herculean task and test my own mental capacity so I rather just go into why I liked this entry in the series.

I think something you realize going back into this entry specifically is the perfect blend of aggression and pressure. Easily one of the toughest entries in the series and while I do prefer the difficulty boost compared to later entries, it does come with some frustrations that kinda hindered my experience back into going into Easy. One of the biggest ones is attempting to level up bodyguards in musou mode on Normal. Playing regularly is fun but those starter two privates die to a sneeze that it felt like babysitting just for them to actually get experience for the stage since that's the only way they develop themselves. Maps are pretty huge too and without a horse item, you're gonna be spending most of the time running around empty fields unless you take all the time to defeat enemies but comes the inherit risk of just dying to an unfortunate musou combo at the end that can waste thirty minutes down the drain. Don't get me wrong, I love the difficulty here since it keeps me focused but I think you should grab some items and upgrades for certain gameplay mechanics before fully attempting it.

The elephant in the room has to be the voice acting which I think is okay but it can be pretty egregious (in a good way personally). Character designs in 3 are some of my favorite with how colorful each design has and how practical they are. Playing a vast majority of the characters myself, they each feel pretty unique and fun especially Lu Bu which is essentially easy mode in itself. It's not a Dynasty Warriors games at this point of the series without a solid soundtrack to boot.

I really think this game is where the series rose into prominence and found its stride especially with the addition of Xtreme Legends adding more content into the game down the line and future spin offs to boot after this. I'm more surprised this still holds up despite some of the gameplay quirks that come with it but it's more to show how strong and familiar the musou formula has been for years. Musou is adapting now it's never bad to forget where we once were.