Image: Koei Tecmo

Dynasty Warriors might be an enormous global phenomenon now, with Musou spinoffs available for just about every major game franchise (up to and including Persona), but that wasn't always the case. While big in Japan, those early games were often dismissed as mindless button-mashers in the West, and given review scores to match. Time, perhaps, for a reassessment, as Dynasty Warriors 3 returns today, remastered and upgraded for modern machines, and it's a hell of a glow-up from its chunky early PS2 days.

For those who have managed to evade the series (perhaps under the incorrect impression that they were some kind of Romance of the Three Kingdoms-themed historical strategy game), the Dynasty Warriors series are arcade brawlers with light action-RPG elements set throughout Chinese history. Pick a character and fight through entire armies, comboing your way through hundreds of regular dudes across a shifting battlefield, with defeat more likely to come from your side's front breaking than your own death. Pure popcorn gaming, but in a Diablo-ish, hideously compelling kinda way, as you work your way up increasingly steep difficulties and level up your gear and characters.

Koei may have opted to call this a remaster, but this really is closer to a full remake from the ground up, mashing together all the content from the original Dynasty Warriors 3 and its standalone 'Xtreme Legends' expansion, in a completely new engine, with fully reworked modern graphics and vastly better English voice acting. They've tried to retain the feel of the original game, with smaller enemy swarms and simpler missions; the experience of playing is significantly tuned up here.

While the combat might seem a bit simplistic and small-scale compared to the much more modernized Dynasty Warriors Origins (this is a back-to-basics game, after all), they've rolled some new features into the core dude-bashing loop here, starting with an Evade button that lets you hop out of danger and get a bit of slow-mo if you time it just right. Parry perverts will be happy with the Perfect Power Guard, which has strict timing but lets you no-sell those big, dangerous boss attacks and counter with a big hit, giving the fighting a bit more depth.

On the RPG stat side of things, there's a whole new weapon fusion system, letting you combine weapons of the same type for a character to combine their stats and perks, plus some new late-game progression options, like elixirs (given as a reward for clearing Musou mode) that permanently boost the base stats of a character, and you can feed as many of them as you like. It seems like a pretty impressive package, all told, and while the flow of it seems to match the PS2 original, a lot of the rougher edges have been sanded down and polished to a mirror sheen.

DYNASTY WARRIORS 3: Complete Edition Remastered is out now on Steam for £33/$40, with the Deluxe edition letting you apply chunky old-school PS2 character models to some of the heroes, as well as providing a few booster items. Cute, but probably not worth the extra £27+ they're asking unless you're a total Musou sicko. The game is also available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and also Nintendo Switch 2.