When I saw that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition had been released on Steam, I entered a state of confusion. Surely I was just misunderstanding a page about the fourth game in the series, which is Musou Orochi 3 in Japan (this one is Musou Orochi 2). But, nope, my eyes didn’t deceive me. I’m not entirely sure why the game was ported now. It’s 10 years old at this point, and the Ultimate version has been around for eight of those years. I did not imagine that porting this was high on Koei Tecmo’s list of priorities, but it’s here all the same. But the question stands: is Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition worth it?
Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is pretty much what it sounds like: the game with all the DLC included. This alone is shocking, as the idea that Koei Tecmo is just including a huge amount of DLC directly with a regular purchase is practically unheard of. I would truly love to learn the circumstances surrounding this, but I doubt I’ll ever find out.
Gotta go back
Warriors Orochi 3 is the second mainline entry in the Orochi series (the game called Orochi 2 in the West is basically an expansion pack). So it’s a crossover about Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors characters meeting, fighting, and joining forces.
While I don’t tend to care about the stories in these games, the one here is admittedly kind of cool. A Hydra has shown up and killed pretty much everybody. Ma Chao, Shima Zhao, and Takenaka Hanbei mount a last-ditch suicide attack, only to get saved during the final minute by Kaguya, a mysterious woman from the Mystic Realm with time travel powers. She promises to help the trio go back in time and save their comrades so that they might all have a chance to defeat the Hydra. The game is broken up into missions where you do just that.
But why?
I know Musou purists are extremely happy about this. As far as I’m concerned, Warriors Orochi 4 is a better game: I like the camera better; it lets you lock onto elites; it has better character movesets and magic abilities. Some fans swear that it’s much worse than Warriors Orochi 3 because they think it’s unbalanced — it is. But this is a series almost solely dedicated to mashing the attack button to mow down thousands of nearly stationary enemies, so I don’t understand why that’s a problem.
Clearly, this release is meant to entice those people to double or even triple dip (this is now the third platform I own the game on). Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition is still one of the best Musou games. But again, this is a series where you mash buttons in an eternal battle against walking coma patients, so that’s not going to mean a lot to the unconverted. While Warriors Orochi 4 has the Dynasty Warriors 8 and Samurai Warriors 4 models and movesets, WO3 one borrows from Dynasty Warriors 7 and Samurai Warriors 3. I like the hyper attacks that Samurai Warriors 4 added, but many think they’re just too overpowered.
The ravages of age
As far as the port goes, it’s definitely functional, but there are some issues. The game launched at 360p for me and I had to switch from fullscreen to borderless to change the resolution. The B button is also the default confirmation button for some reason, which is quite jarring. There are some bugs too. There are reports of graphical glitches, including during Musous and cutscenes. Check out what I mean after this paragraph. It’s a pretty worrisome bug, I’ll tell you.
So, is Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition worth it? If you’re a diehard series fan, then yes. It’s hard to really be too enthusiastic about spending $40 USD on a 10-year-old game, but it does hold up fine (well, as far as Musou games hold up, anyway). It’s got hours and hours of content, which has never looked better, and it includes a buttload of DLC that you can get without Koei Tecmo nickel-and-diming you.
