Tomb Raider King ‒ Episode 8

Episode 8 of Tomb Raider King stretches my patience almost to the limit before delivering an engaging final couple of minutes.

Folks, I’m trying to be on my best behavior here. I’m trying my hardest to not just say the same thing over and over, week in and week out. I’m trying to focus on the positives and meet the series halfway. The problem is I am struggling. Jooheon just has every possible advantage under the sun, outclasses everyone else in basically every category, has no redeeming qualities beyond what a vicarious need for revenge-via-transitive-property can provide, and his only stated motivation is to be more selfish than he was in his last life.

It’s a colossal challenge to care about what’s going on when the hero is unstoppable and irredeemable.

The broken relic hoopla from last episode is a great example of this. Jooheon went through all this trouble to get the relic repair guy, the one with the specialized skills and tools to get over one of his few drawbacks – his overreliance on Dominance to get what he wants out of relics. Now he has the repairman trapped in an inescapable contract that he basically forced him into at gunpoint – a situation I bellyached about last week being too easy to begin with – and that’s not even the end of it! It turns out Jooheon doesn’t even really need the repairman all that much. Instead, our flawless hero can just Dominance his way into repairing relics and do it both faster and better. Gee! What a riveting tale.

Jaeha even goes so far as to ask what use he has in this scenario. Jooheon gives a perfunctory response then reminds him that he is trapped in wage slavery in perpetuity. This sort of arrangement is precisely what Jooheon is chafing against from his past life, and now that he has a chance to do things differently he decides to put that onus on someone else. Amazing stuff, complaining about the injustice of it all simply because he’s not the one meting out the injustice.

At the very least the final battle offers a bit more excitement than normal. A big mob of zombies and shark-guys isn’t much in the creativity department, but the fight with them looks good at least. And, finally, Jooheon manages to face some kind of setback in his relic dagger breaking. Thank God, the tiniest hurdle to have to overcome. But it doesn’t really amount to much as he turns around and goes toe-to-toe with the relic-armed American soldier and hardly seems to be breaking a sweat. How many more episodes are left in this season again…?

Rating:

Tomb Raider King is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

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