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Guan Yu is Gwendolyn's master in Tides of Annihilation, and he is the character who teaches the game's opening tutorial. He is not an Arthurian figure. He comes from Chinese history and from the Three Kingdoms tradition, and readers meeting the name in a game about the Round Table usually assume it is a mistake. It is not.

The reason he fits is the setting. The playable demo takes place inside the Great Russell Museum, the game's stand-in for the British Museum, and that building holds Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese collections. The developers have said the world deliberately mixes several mythologies rather than adapting the Arthurian corpus alone, and the museum is the in-fiction justification for putting them in the same place. Producer Kun Fu has explained the specific link plainly: the Sage of War belongs to the Chinese gallery because the museum itself is where Eastern and Western holdings already meet.

Role in the Game

Master and Tutorial

Guan Yu carries the demo's teaching load. The first of the build's five sections is a tutorial in which he walks Gwendolyn through basic attacks, charge attacks, and summoning and using her knights. Because the summon system is the part of the game that needs explaining most, and because the tutorial is a fight rather than a menu, this puts him on screen for the player's first real combat. Hands-on coverage of the August build describes the relationship as a master and student pairing, and the producer has said it was always the plan to present the figure that way. For the player-facing version of that opening material, see Getting Started and Combat.

His mastery is framed in the game as a matter of knightly spirit rather than of nationality. The studio's own framing puts him forward as a representative of an Eastern equivalent of the knightly ideal, which is the bridge that lets him teach a protagonist who fights with the Knights of the Round Table.

The Green Dragon Crescent Blade

Guan Yu carries the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, the long-handled pole weapon traditionally associated with him. It shows up in a great deal of demo footage, which has caused a recurring misreading: the blade is his, not a weapon Gwendolyn can equip. Gwendolyn's own confirmed weapon types are separate, and in the August build only her sword was actually demonstrated. See Weapon Types for what has and has not been shown.

The Side Quest and the Set Piece

In the August 2026 build, Guan Yu also gives Gwendolyn an optional job: purge an evil spirit troubling another part of the museum. That spirit turns out to be Geraint, the samurai boss of the Japanese wing who becomes an Oni in his second phase, and the quest is how most players found that fight at all.

The payoff is a cutscene at the end of the encounter. Guan Yu arrives on Red Hare, a Chinese yellow dragon overwhelms the Japanese dragon form, and he finishes the boss himself. Not everyone reached it. At least one hands-on writer never beat Geraint inside the session and never saw the scene, which is a useful measure of how hard that optional fight is. Treat this set piece as observed in the Chengdu build rather than as a confirmed feature of the finished game.

Why a Yellow Dragon

The dragon detail is deliberate. The producer has said the dragon Guan Yu uses is a true yellow Chinese dragon, and that it is drawn to look different from the dragon imagery attached to the Japanese character, so that players absorb the distinction without being told about it. That is a small piece of art direction, but it says a lot about how the game handles its borrowed material: the cultures are kept distinct rather than blended into a generic fantasy.

The Historical and Legendary Guan Yu

Guan Yu was a real general who served the warlord Liu Bei in the final decades of the Eastern Han dynasty and died in 220. Over the centuries that followed he was elevated far beyond his military record, receiving posthumous titles and eventually worship as a god of loyalty and martial virtue. He is known in Chinese as the Sage of War, and temples to him stand across China and throughout the Chinese diaspora.

Much of what people picture when they hear the name is not history but fiction. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade and the horse Red Hare both belong to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the fourteenth-century novel that fixed the popular image of the period, rather than to the historical sources. The game draws on that popular image, which is why both appear.

None of this is in-game canon. It is background for the name, in exactly the way this wiki treats Arthurian material on the pages for Mordred and Geraint. Eclipse Glow Games has stated that it respects its source traditions but is not copying them one to one, and that the game offers its own interpretation. See Arthurian Legend in Tides of Annihilation for the same principle applied to the Round Table cast.

What Has Not Been Confirmed

Guan Yu is not a knight of the Round Table and has not been shown as a knight the player can summon or control. Whether he becomes playable, whether he appears past the tutorial and this one side quest, and what his place in the wider story is have all gone unstated. The Chinese section of the museum was also partly blocked off in the demo build, with areas visibly present but closed, so there is more of his gallery to see than the August build allowed.

See Anubis for the boss that closes the demo's exploration section, and Eclipse Glow Games for the studio's wider design statements.