They totally made him weirder than he actually was in the novels/stories, but if you're unfamiliar with why they did that, I'm gunna share because I find it THAT amusing.


I mean in the DW games they turned Zuo Ci into a rather abstract seeming hermit (modeled obviously off of Zhuge Liang) but gave him a sort of overt spiritual or ethereal quality along with evident divine wisdom.



In ROTK the games they made him a weird old dude with a scraggly beard who taught mysticism and was hard to find, listed as a "sage".



In the novels ROTK, he was even cooler:

Okay so storyline wise. Cao Cao leaves his big tough defenders like Zhang Liao and He Fei whilehe pulls back to his capital and acting the badass. He’s chilling in his palace, being all badass and jailing dudes like normal during winter, and some weird dudes come in. One guy “wore a bonnet of white vine-stems and an informal grey Taoist robe” (the translation is okay, but the idea is he’s naturey and really bland looking) and he was “blind in one eye and crippled in one leg”. You can guess who this weird old man is.

So Cao Cao goes to eat some fruit his workers carried in, and as he opens the peel or peels it there is NOTHING inside – which is weird. Zuo Ci comes to court and Cao Cao is all “What the fuck did you do to my fruit! Me hungy hungy for some foods and you ruined it!”.

Zuo Ci peels some fruit, eats it, calls Cao Cao crazy and says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Cao Cao then peels some fruit too, but every one he does is empty. Cao Cao makes a claim of evil magics at Zuo Ci.

Cao Cao is obviously interested at this point, so he offers food to Zuo Ci. Zuo Ci starts eating, never seeming to get full, drunk, or anything – and keeps eating, meals and meals later. Cao Cao is confused as hell and asks Zuo Ci how he does these things. Zuo Ci casually describes a brief event when he was a hermit and how he had some divine experience blahblahblah and basically asks if Cao Cao wants to become his Tao student.

Cao Cao basically says he can’t, and Zuo Ci says he should and then threatens Cao Cao which isn’t cool at all, even mentioning a Shu officers that could take Cao Cao’s place. So Cao Cao calls for his guards, wanting to get this weird old retard arrested and they surround him and start wailing on him and hitting him – Zuo Ci yawns and goes to sleep while they’re doing this, seemingly unbothered by the attacks. So they cage him up and position a guard to watch him. The next morning they find the guard in the cage and Zuo Ci sleeping on the ground outside of it. Then they with-hold food from him for a week, and he seems fine, as he’s Zuo Ci.

Cao Cao goes to have a big meal, Zuo Ci magically appears and does some tricks while Cao Cao tries to outwit him. It isn’t going well for Cao Cao obviously, though he is making ridiculous requests from Zuo Ci that he somehow pulls off in amusing manners. We’re talking like classic magic tricks, turning things into birds, making fish appear, etc. He eventually disappears and Cao Cao is all “GET THAT NIGGA!”. Obviously this doesn’t work too well. Xu Chu chases him (you can recognize this as ‘Xu Zhu’ from the vidya games, which is the obese ex-villager who joins Cao Cao and wields that enormous iron-ox-ball on a stick and rolls around) and sees Zuo Ci hide in a herd of sheep. Chu kills all the sheep like an asshole, leaving the owner a very depressed. But a sheep head somehow speaks to him and says “Stick the bodyparts back together” and the kid is going to run, but Zuo Ci stops him and is all “Chill, I’m doing you a favor, trust me”. So he brought the sheep back alive.

Cao Cao is furious at this point and has people searching everywhere for Zuo Ci. This is the part that is hilarious to me. So they look around and they found HUNDREDS of men who look exactly like Zuo Ci, tons of them arrested. They all look exactly the same, down to the details – “one drooping lid, one lame leg, white vine-stem cap, grey casual gown, wooden sandals”. So they execute them all simultaneously, but as they cut them down – the body parts start shooting out blue gas (or spiritual spirit looking stuff, but basically gas) and it floats up into the air and mixes together, turning into Zuo Ci who is now flying. He laughs a lot, hops on a bird, and then reanimates all the corpses which are hopping around scaring the fuck outa people too. Suddenly it all vanishes.


Timeline wise, this is right before Huang Zhong takes Tiandang, which is a famous moment you can remember from the games as well and all. But yeah. Zuo Ci was insanely awesome. My personal favorite otherwise, for weird coolness, is Mi Heng.




Zuo Ci’s poem:


He sprang to cloud and swept around our realm
Freely, harmless, avoiding days malign
Casually he worked his conjuries
But Cao Cao never understood his signs









But yeah. Zuo Ci is really weird and cool - but I don't like the direction they took with him in the newer games.