New stages, characters, weapons, attacks and music are introduced providing a completely new experience to a player that has played Dynasty Warriors 2 before.

To make this possible, officers and commanders have superhuman abilities and have the capability to kill hundreds of enemy soldiers per stage.

Each playable character of the three main nations have their own Musou mode which consists of a number of stages that resemble events in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The game begins at the fall of the Han dynasty shortly before the death of the Emperor Ling[10] when the leader of the Way of Peace, Zhang Jiao,[11] led an uprising against the Empire.

The game features a strong mix of fact and fiction from Chinese history and often exaggerates characters and their personalities.

The three kingdoms primarily involved, Shu, Wu and Wei, each sought power enough to overthrow the other two and unify China under their rule.

Although the story in Dynasty Warriors is not perfect in the sense that it does not accurately follow the historical events, it has been changed to make the game more playable and less repetitive.

The game features environments resembling that of ancient China and various items from the era such as fairy wine and dim sum.

Many of the stages are recreations of notable battles present historically or from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while original creations became more common with the newer installments.

[4] Dynasty Warriors 3 still retains a number of the bad features that were in the previous game such as fogging and low quality English voice actors.

[17] Chi Kong Lui of GameCritics.com[33] looked past the sound and graphical flaws and concentrated more on the gameplay and setting, giving a high score of 9/10.

[47] Xtreme Legends added several new features to Dynasty Warriors 3, including new items and the ability to fully customize bodyguards.

Xtreme Legends also included a Musou Mode for the playable characters who did not belong to either Wu, Wei, or Shu (Diao Chan, Lu Bu, Zhang Jiao, Dong Zhuo, Yuan Shao, Zhu Rong and Meng Huo).

Xtreme Legends also allowed players to obtain a fifth-level weapon for each character and added two new difficulty levels: Beginner and Expert.