The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Tomb Raider King

Fortune favors the opportunistic, and when mysterious Tombs housing ancient Relics started to appear, those lucky enough to first discover and harness the supernatural powers within them established a new world order. Others rushed to join the playing field, just to find that the only option available to them was to be a pawn for the elite. Jooheon Suh was one such latecomer but still a talented raider in his own right, too talented to die in some random Tomb after falling into a trap—and clearly, a higher being out there agrees because instead of dying, he finds himself waking up fifteen years in the past! Armed with years of experience and foresight, Jooheon's determined to pave a different path for himself as the Tomb Raider King!

Tomb Raider King is based on the Korean comic and novel series by author Sanji Jiksong and illustrator 2B2S. The animated series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

Where the hell is Lara Croft? Did someone seriously make a series with the phrase “Tomb Raider” in the title that's completely divorced from the globally iconic video game franchise? That seems ill-advised and will create distracting comparisons…including the opening to this review!

Jokes aside, the first episode of Tomb Raider King fails to tee up a world that I'd like to explore or set up a main character that I'd like to see more of. Beginning with the protagonist, Jooheon Suh, about to die while battling a giant snake monster, a magic talking crow sends the man back in time before these fantasy shenanigans were commonplace. Now in 2025, Suh monologues to the audience that later this year, tombs containing Relic begin to spring up across the world, completely disrupting society and creating a pocket industry of people trying to collect these powerful artifacts for themselves. Suh used to work for a monopolist, Kwon, to raid tombs and collect these artifacts for his benefit, until he was apparently betrayed in an unknown series of events that led to him almost dying at the hands of that giant snake monster.

Even with his tragic (and casually mentioned) backstory of being an orphan, Suh seems like a jerk. His only defining qualities so far are that he's obsessed with revenge and has a chip on his shoulder thanks to the hardship he endured in childhood and young adulthood. Nothing this episode shares about this character makes me want to root for him, and his design is so bland that he truly feels like a default edgelord isekai protagonist.

Tomb Raider King also seemingly breaks its own world lore within the span of the first episode. At the episode's midpoint, Suh says that Tombs and Relics start appearing in the world after a series of natural disasters, only for the episode to end with a forgettable thug pulling out a gilded knife that's apparently a Relic. Beyond this narrative incongruity pulling me out of the show, I find the tone of Tomb Raider King to be at odds with its worldbuilding. This is a story where magic and fantasy shenanigans become real, and it's such a bummer that Tomb Raider King cannot find an ounce of whimsy in its overtly fantastical premise.

I want to give this show more of a chance, as I think it would be rad if Korean animation had a bigger presence on the world stage, but the Tomb Raider King premiere really did not impress and seems poised to be received as a Solo Leveling knock-off.

So far as I'm concerned, the title Tomb Raider King is already a self-defeating oxymoron, since the only Tomb Raider that we recognize in this house is a British archaeologist who wields a pair of pistols (or pickaxes, depending on the story) alongside her impeccable sense of fashion and wit. No shade to Seo Joo-Heon, the protagonist of Tomb Raider King, but Lara Croft was running circles and doing backflips around all of his achievements when he was still being potty-trained.

Since it wouldn't exactly be fair to compare Tomb Raider King to a longstanding and completely unrelated franchise from an altogether different medium, though, I will have to judge this latest webtoon adaptation on its own merits. Based on this very first episode, my impression of TRK errs towards “It wants to be Solo Leveling so bad.” I'm not accusing the source material of plagiarism or anything - so far as I can tell, the webtoon of TRK actually came out a couple of years before Solo Leveling - but so far as adaptations go, I am getting a distinct whiff of coattail chasing from this show. This might just be because, both in terms of his design and his personality as a character, Seo Joo-Heon is completely indistinguishable from every other “Webtoon Hero Guy” protagonist I've ever seen, including Sung Jin-Woo himself. Joo-Heon is just another generic tall-and-handsome dude who has been given random magical powers and the ability to violate the laws of time and space to pursue his vague need for revenge and success.

If anything, at least shows like Solo Leveling give their self-insert heroes the trappings of human relationships and relatable motivations at the very beginning of their stories to trick you into thinking that their protagonists might be developed as actual characters instead of the infallible monster-killing video-game avatars that they really are. Here, in Tomb Raider King, Joo-Heon just seems like a smug and selfish asshole. So much of the first episode is devoted to setting up frivolous RPG mechanics and lore details that the show never gets around to convincing us that we should give a damn about this guy at all.

So, with the substance of its story an apparent bust from jump, all Tomb Raider King really has going for it is the admittedly decent production style. STUDIO EEK has opted for bold linework and bright colors that make the series look like a webtoon in motion, and the premiere is certainly not terribly difficult to watch, provided you are completely tuned out of whatever any of the characters are speaking and thinking at any given moment. The CGI used for the monster battle in the first episode looks a bit garish and dated, but not so bad as to completely take us out of the action.

Overall, I'm not convinced that this will be anyone's idea of a true “Solo Leveling Killer”, but it might just make for a decent time killer if the only thing you are looking for is decently animated action. The next episode may establish something in the way of a narrative hook that will make it worth investing in Tomb Raider King for an entire season, but I plan on keeping my expectations well in check.

The disingenuous route for talking about this show would be to compare it directly to Solo Leveling. While it does share dungeons, relics, the modern-day setting, and being brought back to life aspects of that show, at this point, Tomb Raider King is hardly the only one. There is a massive—not to mention thriving—sub-genre of web novels and Manhwa built on this exact premise. Thus, what's important is not what it shares with its mega-hit forebear, but how it sets itself apart.

The most obvious aspect in this first episode is Jooheon himself. While certainly an underdog due to circumstances beyond his control, he is anything but weak. In flashbacks, we see him break into tombs and liberate treasures no one else could. In the present, even with his untrained body, he handles thugs like they're nothing—even in groups.

But what's truly interesting about Jooheon is his personality. Rather than being cold and stoic or a silly nice guy, he's actually a character with a good amount of range. He's calm when facing the high schooler and his mom, kind when with Geonwoo, a bit sadistic when facing the thugs who abused him, and angry when he sees his life has been gamified by some unknown relic.

And, on a side note, can I say how nice it was to see a character as annoyed by status windows as I am? I know it's just lampshading the issue—that this story will use status windows as blatantly as every other work in this sub-genre—but it still feels good to have a character react in a way other than simply interest or surprise when glowing blue pop-ups start appearing.

All that said, with this first episode, things are pretty much by the numbers for a dungeons-suddenly-appear-in-the-modern-world-and-normal-people-gain-superpowers-and-explore-them story. Other than Jooheon, little stands out—but perhaps now that all the setup is out of the way, Tomb Raider King will be able to blaze its own path.