The story starts with a fairly straightforward idea. Tombs begin appearing around the world, and inside them are relics drawn from myths, legends, folklore and popular stories. These relics grant powers to whoever obtains them, which naturally turns the entire thing into a race between people who want those powers for themselves. Seo Joo-Heon (Hwang Chang-young) gets caught up in that world as a tomb raider working for a wealthy, opportunistic man, and his relationship with that employer eventually leaves him betrayed and on the brink of death. Then a crow shows up and gives him a second chance.
Joo-Heon goes back 15 years into the past, retaining his memories, experience and the skills he picked up during his previous life. He knows which relics will appear, what they can do and who will try to get them first. That gives him a huge advantage, and the story wastes little time making use of it. He also gets the familiar game-like interface, complete with skills and quests, and starts out as an F-rank Tomb Raider who has to unlock four skills before he can awaken his full abilities.
You have probably seen this sort of setup before. Time travel, game mechanics, special abilities and a protagonist who knows how the future plays out have become common ingredients in Korean action stories. Tomb Raider King does not reinvent any of them. What it does have is a more interesting toy box in the form of the relics.
The first episode mostly exists to establish the rules, explain Joo-Heon’s situation and get him into position for the second chance he has been given. There is a lot of information to get through, and the series clearly wants the viewer to understand how its world operates before it starts throwing bigger events at the protagonist. That makes the opening feel somewhat slow even though the actual runtime moves along at a reasonable pace. There are still plenty of episodes left for the story to become more ambitious, so I can forgive some of this setup.
The relic concept becomes much more interesting once Joo-Heon starts actually raiding tombs. In the second episode, he begins making moves to secure some of the earliest relics and build an advantage over everyone else. His actions attract attention from organisations such as the CIA and Japan’s JSDF, but the more interesting part is watching how he approaches the tombs themselves.
One of the best examples is a relic based on Aesop’s fable “The Silver Axe and the Gold Axe”. A giant serpent holds a silver sword and a golden sword in its mouth and asks which one belongs to you. Knowing the original story helps, but the tomb does not simply reproduce the fable and call it a day. It changes the situation enough to turn the familiar story into an actual challenge.
That gives the dungeon sequences a little more character than the usual “enter room, kill monster, collect item” routine. The idea that each relic comes from a specific story, myth or legend also gives the series a large pool of material to play with. I particularly like that the show treats the relics as more than stat boosts or flashy weapons. It establishes that compatibility and affinity between a relic and its owner matter, which could become an important part of the story later.
I have only seen two episodes, so I cannot say how much the series will actually do with that idea. Right now, though, it gives Tomb Raider King something more interesting to build around than the standard progression system.
The strongest part of Tomb Raider King is easily its presentation. Studio EEK has done a very good job with the animation, lighting, backgrounds, composition and overall visual direction. The colour work is vivid without making everything look flat, the shadows add a lot to the dungeon scenes. There are moments where the background art gets a surprising amount of attention. Some locations look beautiful, especially when the lighting and environment work together.
