Well, here's the start of my DW3 playthrough. Before you even ask, yes, I've played everyone. I'll be uploading every single Musou Mode over the course of...probably the next 3 months. DW3 is a really...really...long game. Unlike DW2, there are unique scenes, dialogue, and different stages for each Musou Mode so I decided to show everything.

Also keep in mind that this is my first time playing DW3. If I go to a section of the map that has nothing, run around in circles, don't trigger an event, or anything along those lines it's because I don't know about it. As I'm typing this I know a helluva lot about DW3 having played every character's Musou Mode, but at the time of recording it was all new to me.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get into it. I started as Zhao Yun what with him being the poster boy. Since I'm playing with XL, I have every character unlocked from the start so I can play in any order I want. There are also some minor changes compared to the regular DW3 though I couldn't tell you exactly what all of those are.

Zhao Yun starts at Chang Ban, which is honestly kind of a rough stage to start at. This is because your starting position at Chang Ban is right in front of Zhang Liao and Xiahou Dun. These two aren't exactly pushovers with a fresh character that doesn't even have any items. Ideally, you'll want to defeat them so they don't cause trouble for your allies later but if they're too difficult you can ignore them.

Your goal in this stage is to get Liu Bei to retreat, or at least that's what the game tells you. In actuality Liu Bei will always take waaay too long to retreat so you'll just end up going to kill Cao Cao once he appears, which can also end the stage. There is a cutscene that plays if Liu Bei successfully retreats but I never saw it because I had better things to do than wait for him to reach the boats in the southwest, and then for Liu Bei to wait for the peasants to escape first.

Anyways, with Xiahou Dun and Zhang Liao out of the way you can either go south to fight off Xu Zhu or you can go to the northwest down the narrow path to assault Cao Cao's forces concentrated around that area. Xu Zhu is currently fighting Liu Bei, but Liu Bei doesn't acknowledge fat people and will ignore him so he isn't actually a threat. He'll actually get hung up on Xiahou Yuan who is blocking the center. The northwestern forces will go to support Xiahou Yuan, so it's best to take care of them first or even just Bline it to Xiahou Yuan first. There's also a cutscene that plays if you go the northwestern path and come back out at the center, which will increase Liu Bei's morale.

Of course, I didn't know any of that my first time playing so I didn't trigger the cutscene and went after Xu Zhu first. Then made a loop to deal with all the other enemies before coming back to where I fought Xiahou Dun and Zhang Liao, since that's where Cao Cao appears. Cao Cao will almost always be halted here if you defeat Zhang Liao and Xiahou Dun first. Otherwise the three of them will tear into your forces together.

There is a rare thing that can happen, where if Liu Bei has covered a lot of ground before Cao Cao appears, Cao Cao will take the northwestern path and ignore everyone defending the rear and just go to attack Liu Bei directly by cutting him off. But this only happened to me twice I believe so it's not common.