I’ve been working on this rant for a while now. I’ve found it’s hard to properly convey my thoughts without just sounding like a miserable old man that just wants to see some cleavage. And that’s fine, because sometimes I am a miserable old man that just wants to see some cleavage. But this is more than that. While I admit, swinging Lara around in all manner of skin tight outfits certainly had its appeal, there was also a certain element of the old Tomb Raider games that got tossed out with the bathwater in this new trilogy.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is now less than a month away, as evidenced by the slew of preview videos and trailers being released over the past few days. In them, we see Lara continuing down her dark path as she kills dozens of armed baddies by drowning them, hanging them, and just flat-out murdering them with murder. It’s a stark contrast to the green, trembling, scared Lara from the beginning of Tomb Raider 2013.

The Tomb Raider reboot was lauded for ditching the sexy, big breasted super-model Lara Croft for a young, innocent college girl obsessed with continuing her father’s research. She was given “realistic” dimensions and dressed in tattered, yet fairly modest clothing, opting instead to make Lara less of an icon for horny fanboys and more of a strong, driven woman showing young ladies everywhere that it’s okay to be smart, strong, and independent. Which is all fine and dandy. I had no problem with that. What made me scratch my head back in 2013, was that Lara Croft as we knew her was already smart, strong, and independent. She just also happened to have huge boobs. Remember kids, it’s okay to be smart and strong as long as you don’t also have DDs!

But okay, whatever. I played the first two games in the new trilogy and I really enjoyed them. The stories were still non-sensical Tomb Raider mumbo jumbo that we’ve come to expect, and the new Lara was a likeable character in her own right.

But then something happened.

I’ve been watching the trailers for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and it is dark. Not like, I can’t see what’s going on ‘dark,’ but rather I can’t imagine Lara doing the things she’s doing. She’s fucking brutal. I see her stealth kills and her stalking -nay, hunting these guys and I think to myself, “This isn’t the Lara I remember.” Now to be fair, Lara Croft has always been a mass murderer. So has Nathan Drake, for that matter. But there’s a difference between doing side-flips while hosing some guys down in a shoot-out spouting cheesy one-liners, and slowly creeping up on some dude and shoving a knife in his throat, pulling him into the water, and then snapping his neck while he drowns and bleeds to death. That’s the kind of shit where you just kinda stare at a homie and say “Fuck, bro.”

Remember that scene in The Patriot, where Mel Gibson’s character goes ballistic on a British soldier with a fucking tomahawk while his kid watches, and his kid is like, holy fuck my dad’s a psycho?

Yeah, it’s kinda like that.

I don’t know if I want First Blood Rambo Lara. Not because I don’t think a woman can be capable of such brutality (have you seen Snapped?) but because, damn, shit’s gettin’ heavy. We won’t know for another month just what kind of road Lara will be going down, but if she walks out of this any less than moderately traumatized, I will be amazed. It’s hard to see Lara later on in her life being a smooth talking, suave, globe-trotting heiress daredevil, kicking ass and talking shit. Ya know, the one we all grew to love (and the one that made her a household name to begin with?)

I miss that Lara Croft.

The old Lara represents something that the gaming industry has been getting more and more afraid of in recent years, as it aims to be more inclusive, less divisive, and overall more vanilla. And don’t get me wrong, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when you have Tecmo putting the Dead or Alive 6 ladies in long sleeve shirts and sweat pants, you know there’s a paradigm shift taking place. Like a short dude in a huge truck, you know over-compensation when you see it.

Somehow, the old Lara Croft came to represent sexism, objectification of women, and… well I don’t know. It never made much sense to me. What exactly are they objectifying? Breasts? Smart, strong breasts? And who exactly was offended by this in the first place? Ask any gamer girl their top 5 video game heroines and I’d be willing to bet a good percentage of them will list Lara Croft. Not the new Lara either, the old one. Why? Because she was a smart, sexy badass. She was a woman’s woman. Smooth, cunning, intelligent, connected, and hot. If she was a guy, she’d be George Clooney in Ocean’s 11. Don’t believe me? Google “Lara Croft cosplay.”

Which one are the majority of them dressing up as? I’ll give you a hint: Not the new one. And it’s not just male fantasy photography or porn either (though there’s some pretty good shit out there for that too). These are real females dressing up as a character they really love.

The Eidos and Crystal Dynamics of today would love to argue otherwise, but I’m old enough to remember when they not only acknowledged Lara’s sex appeal, they flaunted it. Lara was a cash cow.

When the Guinness Book of World Records named Lara Croft the “most famous and most successful female video game character in the world,” it would still be at least three years before the new, “relatable” Lara would make her debut. So why did we, a collective group of fans and gamers who all love the wetsuit-wearing, side-flipping, T-Rex-killing, rope-swinging, globe-trotting, cocky, intelligent, rich British femme fatale, ultimately get robbed of the character that had already garnered so much success?

The long answer has to do with a more believable character with more depth, and rebooting the series as something fresh, and showing an emotional journey of growth and self-discovery. The short answer is probably marketing.

Let’s be honest, in the current social/political climate, it’s much easier to slap this character on the front of a magazine or web advertisement…

Than one like this…

Nothing sells in the good ol’ US of A like sex and violence. Only remove the sex, cuz that’s bad.

Okay. Breathe. Now that I got that out of my system, I can turn my attention to the other mis-step that they’ve taken with the new trilogy. The one I mentioned in my first paragraph, before I went all “senior citizen” on you, that other element.

It seems, for whatever reason, that this new Lara Croft is completely bereft of a sense of humor, or adventure. Lara Croft was always beset by an almost child-like sense of awe and wonder, constantly fascinated by what she found and always consumed by the desire to unearth a mystery. She was always quick with a witty remark or a confident attitude. The Indiana Jones influence was strong there, and back when the Tomb Raider, ya know, actually raided tombs, it was always fun to discover what each ancient location had in store for us.

Remember that time she found the Infinity Gauntlet and killed half the universe?

Even though the series always seemed to turn mystical or fantastic in regards to the relics she found, there was always that discovery that made the games fun. At some point, when the writers and developers were creating this new Tomb Raider, they forgot to inject some personality. Who was the lead director, Eeyore?

I’m not saying the games aren’t fun. Like I stated earlier, I’ve enjoyed both of them very much. But there’s a difference between enjoying a game for what it is, and missing what it used to be. I don’t just miss the old Lara Croft, I miss the old Tomb Raider. It was like Naughty Dog basically did everything TR did but better in Uncharted, and Crystal Dynamics just said “welp, I guess they won then” and took their toys home. Then they came back with Super-Serious Psycho Death Dealer Lara, harbinger of the Mayan Apocalypse. That’s not depressing at all.

Perhaps I’m over-reacting. Maybe I’ll change my mind once I play the third and final game in the trilogy. Maybe they’ll hint that Lara will emerge as the grown up, mature Croft that we remember. Maybe she’ll wake up and be 8 years old again and the whole thing was a dream. Maybe she’ll get abducted by aliens. Who the fuck knows.

I’m anxious to check out Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but I’m also anxious for this series to be tied up in a nice little tidy bow, so that maybe, hopefully, the next game we see in the Tomb Raider franchise will be a return to its roots. Much like Capcom did with the Resident Evil series, eventually you just gotta go back to what made you successful in the first place.

It just so happens, that success had a giant set of boobs.