Character · One Piece
Roronoa Zoro
Three swords, one of them clamped in his teeth, and no ability whatsoever to find the kitchen.
In Otakana the clue reads: Three-sword swordsman with no sense of direction
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 4 · Easy
Roronoa Zoro wants to be the world's greatest swordsman because he promised a girl he would, and she died the day after he said it. He fights with three blades, which is not a figure of speech: one in each hand and a katana held in his jaw, a style he built as a child and has never found a reason to abandon.
The direction problem is the joke everybody knows. Zoro can walk out of a room and arrive on a different island, and he will maintain that the room moved. It is played for laughs constantly, and it is also why he keeps wandering into fights nobody sent him to, arriving in the right place by a route that makes no sense to anyone including him.
The other half of the character is loyalty stated once and never revisited. When his captain's life is on the table he offers his own without negotiating, and when a fight beats him badly enough that the story could reasonably end him, he stays upright. He also sleeps anywhere, drinks anything, and treats the ship's cook as a personal insult with legs.
Spelling ZORO
ZORO is four letters and one of the better traps here. Early English releases printed ZOLO, because the name plays on Zorro and the licensors wanted some daylight from it, and the Japanese supports either reading since the language does not separate R from L. The tiles want ZORO. Two O's, one R, nothing doubled, and one very stubborn wrong memory to overcome.