The old tomb raiders were obviously hugely based on sex sells. the ads had half-naked 300 polygon lara and all that. So for the reboot trilogy starting 2013 they seemed to have wanted to scale that back a bit, make it more “woke”.
It feels so much more misogynistic to me than the old titles with her scantily clad outfits because it changes the dynamic from “Lara Croft is a badass who kickshoots a T-Rex to death wearing hotpants” to “Lara Croft ends up in weirdremovedy sex and/or torture situations a lot while wearing cargopants”.
I’m not going to claim the old Tomb Raiders are like bastions of even good examples of feminist media but the 2013 Tomb Raider is especially bad at this. Lara as a charcter does beat the odds but my god is half that game women torture porn and all the payoff it might have had at the end is basically thrown overboard entirely by the time the sequel starts. I mean you end up that game showing a lot more skin than you started out with but not because Lara the character figures hot pants and a crop top is a pretty good outfit to go spelunking in old aztec temples in but because it is literally torn apart from a combination of enviromental hazards, animals and human enemies. The sequels at least turn down the gruesome death animations which in the first reboot one are insanely focused on showing Lara getting penetrated by spears and sharpened sticks. It is not at all subtle.
Apart from the feminism stuff one of the most “are you fucking kidding me” moments in gaming history I’ve had is when in 2013 Tomb Raider you shoot the final bad guy with akimbo pistols, become THE Lara Croft in a heroic save the world moment and then you start Rise of the Tomb Raider and it’s back to one pistol
I didn’t know that happens. That does seem like a fun way to conclude the first reboot game and it’s a shame the devs were cowards after.
It’s such a hype moment in the first reboot prequel game. Like it genuinely hits, it’s good. Absolutely baffling to me that they just didn’t do shit with in the sequel
The sequel suffered from “the first game was successful so let’s do it again” IMO, which unfortunately meant rewinding Lara’s character growth so that they could hit all the same beats again.