Why does Sir Daniel Fortesque have one eye?

The official legend of Gallowmere says Sir Daniel Fortesque led the charge, fought the sorcerer Zarok's horde, and died a hero's death in single combat. The game's own history tells the truth. Dan was a storyteller, a charlatan knighted for tall tales and made Captain of the Royal Battalion in peacetime. At the Battle of Gallowmere in 1286, he was killed in the opening seconds, by the very first arrow fired, which took him through his left eye.

King Peregrin could not afford a farce, so he manufactured a hero: the records proclaimed Dan the slayer of Zarok, and the truth went into the tomb with him. A century of burial edited him further. The missing eye is the wound that killed him; the missing lower jaw, which fell off in the tomb, is why the resurrected Dan can only mumble. When Zarok's sorcery raises him in 1386, the fraud gets the one thing his life never contained: a real battle, and a chance to earn the legend retroactively.

So the one eye is not a character-design quirk. It is the receipt for the story's central joke and its central pathos: the hero of Gallowmere is a liar with an arrow wound, and everything he does in the game is an attempt to deserve, after death, the reputation he stole in life.