I roll with the Shu, so Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are my dudes, loved the games so much i read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms text which is some massive ish. Some of my favorite stories,
Cao Cao found Dian Wei when dude was chasing a tiger around, that's how strong that cat was.
Gan Ning was a straight up pirate and joined up with the Wu while he still had beef with some of the officers. I think it was with Lu Meng, but he was doing some traditional sword dance ish with the officer and dudes were legit planning on killing each other till which ever Sun (Quan?) who led the crew at the time stepped in.
Cao Cao actually tried to steal Guan Yu from the Shu which is how Guan Yu wound up with Lu Bu's famous horse. Guan Yu turned that ish down but on his way out a misunderstanding meant Guan Yu scrapped with a handful of tough cats including Xiahou Dun (there's a mission in the DW games but the last ones I played never really explained what was going on well enough).
Zhuge Liang was basically the real life Shikamaru if you believe the account in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. His strategies saved Liu Bei and the squad constantly and at one point he literally just left a few supply bags and notes for when to open them with Liu Bei during a campaign. The advice and supplies wound up being dead on for what was gonna go down and saving everyone involved.
Zhang Fei holding down a bridge and scaring off a massive army of Cao Cao's had a clip in one of the games I remember, but I don't think it showed how much he scared those cats. If I remember correctly Cao Cao fainted.