The first Dynasty Warriors ( Sangokumusō) is a traditional one-on-one fighting game, released in 1997 for the PlayStation. In 2008, it was Koei's most successful franchise, and as of February 2020, the series has sold more than 21 million copies worldwide.

This is evidenced by Koei-Tecmo's celebration of the series's 20th anniversary in 2020, two decades after the release of Dynasty Warriors 2. Because the original Dynasty Warriors game belongs to a separate genre and has a different series title in Japan, Koei Tecmo does not consider it a formal entry in the Dynasty Warriors series. Since then, all English titles have been numbered one larger than their Japanese counterparts. When the game was localized for the North American market, the name became Dynasty Warriors 2. Koei later created a new game as a spin-off and added the word shin ( 真, true, genuine) to the beginning of the title to differentiate it from its predecessor.

The first game in the series, titled Dynasty Warriors in English and Sangokumusō in Japanese, was a fighting game, a separate genre from the rest of the games in the series. The series is a spin-off of Koei's turn-based strategy Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, based upon the Chinese novel of the same name, which is a fictionalized and exaggerated version of the Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms. 'True Three Kingdoms Unrivaled') is a series of Japanese hack and slash action video games created by Omega Force and Koei. Dynasty Warriors ( 真・三國無双, Shin Sangokumusō, lit.

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