Key Takeaways
- Dynasty Warriors series producer Tomohiko Sho says he would personally prefer not to keep making remasters, hinting he may hand that work to someone else on the team.
- Sho is now in his fifties and says he thinks about how many more games he can make before retirement — which is pushing him towards new projects and sequels.
- He described the remaster process as almost a complete remake and questioned why he was remaking games he already made himself.
- Future Dynasty Warriors remasters are not ruled out — but whether they happen depends on how well Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered sells.
- Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered launched October 1, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam, and is currently sitting at a Very Positive Steam rating.
- Sho has previously hinted at a Dynasty Warriors: Origins sequel or trilogy — suggesting his new games ambitions are already pointed in a clear direction.
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from revisiting your own old work — fixing things you did differently back then, wondering why you made certain calls, knowing you could do it differently now. For Dynasty Warriors producer Tomohiko Sho, that feeling landed hard during the making of Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered. And it’s got him thinking bigger picture about how many games he’s actually got left in him — and what he wants them to be.
Sho’s Honest Take on Remastering His Own Games
Speaking to 4Gamer shortly after Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered launched, Sho was asked about the prospect of more remasters coming down the line. His answer was direct in a way you don’t often get from developers doing press for a new release.
“I can’t say anything at the moment, and I haven’t even thought about it, but it’s not impossible that we’ll remaster titles that aren’t available on Steam,” he said. “However, to be honest, I don’t want to do it. It would be almost a complete remake, and even this time I sometimes thought, ‘Why am I remaking something I made myself?’ I’m in my fifties now, and I sometimes think about ‘how many more games can I make before I retire’, so I’d rather make new games or sequels.”
That’s a refreshingly candid thing to say out loud when you’ve just shipped a remaster. Sho has been part of the Dynasty Warriors series since the very beginning — he was a planner on Dynasty Warriors 2, the 2000 title that introduced the iconic one-vs-thousands hack-and-slash gameplay the franchise has been built on ever since. He’s since worked on every major entry in the series on his way to becoming the series producer. That’s decades of building something, and the idea that he’d rather spend whatever creative time remains on new ground rather than retreading old ones is completely understandable.
Remasters Aren’t Dead — But He’s Not Volunteering to Lead Them
The key nuance in Sho’s statement is that he’s not saying the Dynasty Warriors remaster pipeline is shutting down. The door is open — it’s just that he’s not the one he wants walking through it for future projects.
Sho said he still feels an obligation to fans who want more classic games brought forward, and that he’s considered handing those responsibilities to other members of the team. The implication is clear: if the sales numbers on Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered justify another remaster further down the catalogue, it’ll happen — but Sho is angling to stay focused on the new stuff while someone else picks up the historical preservation work.
That’s actually a sensible way to structure a studio’s output. The skills required to sensitively remaster a 25-year-old game and the creative energy required to build a new game pushing the series in fresh directions aren’t the same, and there’s no rule that says the same person has to do both. Delegating one to the next generation of developers while the series veteran concentrates on new projects sounds like good sense.
What Does Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered Actually Include?
For those not across the release, Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is a substantial package. It covers both Dynasty Warriors 3 and its Xtreme Legends expansion, rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5 to mark the original game’s 25th anniversary. The character models were completely reconstructed to match their original designs, the maps were recreated with new assets and textures, and a range of quality-of-life features were added — including a checkpoint system so you’re not redoing 30-minute sessions after a stray arrow ends your run.
Mechanics from the more recent Dynasty Warriors: Origins were also imported selectively — an evasion button, a counter window for enemy officer special attacks — without overhauling the core combat identity. The team deliberately kept the old-school feel intact. Split-screen co-op returns, every Challenge Mode from Xtreme Legends is included, and the game even keeps the famously questionable voice acting and janky camera of the original. Whether you consider the last point a feature or a bug probably tells you whether you grew up with the PS2 era or not.
Critical reception has been solid. Metacritic sits at 79 and OpenCritic’s top critic average is similar, with scores ranging from strong 8s from outlets like TheSixthAxis and DualShockers to more mixed takes pointing at the age of the mission structure compared to modern musou titles. Steam user reviews are currently Very Positive, which is the metric Sho has said will determine whether more remasters follow.
What New Games Is Sho Actually Thinking About?
Sho has given us a pretty clear signal already. Earlier in 2026, speaking to Famitsu ahead of the Dynasty Warriors: Origins “Visions of Four Heroes” DLC launch on Nintendo Switch 2, he revealed that the Origins sequel — which was initially planned as a duology — might need to become a trilogy to do justice to the full Three Kingdoms story it’s adapting.
Origins originally covered events up to the Battle of Chi Bi in 208 AD, deliberately going deep on a narrower period rather than the franchise’s traditional approach of spanning the whole saga at high speed. The sequel was supposed to take things through to the Battle of Wuzhang Plains — but Sho admitted that maintaining the same narrative density while covering that much more ground in a single game was looking impossible. A trilogy structure was floated as the solution.
That’s the kind of ambitious long-term planning that makes sense for someone who wants to spend the creative years he has left building new things. A three-game series taking Dynasty Warriors’ most acclaimed modern entry and completing its story over multiple releases is a far more compelling use of a veteran producer’s time than revisiting the back catalogue — and it explains exactly why Sho is trying to pass the remaster torch to someone else sooner rather than later.
A Veteran Who Knows What He Wants
There’s something genuinely refreshing about a series veteran with Sho’s track record being this candid about where his head’s at. The games industry has a tendency to use legacy developers as insurance — attach a recognisable name to a nostalgia product and let the brand recognition do the work. Sho acknowledging that he finds the remaster process draining and that he’d rather be building new things cuts against that tendency in a way that’s worth appreciating.
It also suggests that wherever Dynasty Warriors goes next, it’ll be shaped by someone who’s still got genuine creative ambition for the series rather than just executing on demand. The Origins trilogy, if it materialises, will be the real test of that — and based on what Origins delivered when it launched in 2025, that’s something worth being properly excited about.
If you’re into the current wave of gaming launches and updates this week, check out our breakdown of 007 First Light’s free Extended Operations DLC which added New Game Plus and a brutal new 00 difficulty mode. And for more on this week’s biggest gaming story, our piece on Aion 2 hitting Steam’s top charts ahead of its global free-to-play launch today is worth a read too.
