I’m thinking of Quiet from Metal Gear Solid 5, a pretty great character completely ruined by Hideo Kojima’s junior high-level interest in boobs. I’m definitely not in the “no woman should show skin or have sex appeal” camp of game design, but I do recognize that more often than not, when modern games are trying to make “sexy” characters the way they used to in years past, it just falls flat. It’s not without its lingering issues, but whatever the problems are, they have nothing to do with whether or not Croft is sexualized for the player. Has the series lost anything because of this transformation? No, and Tomb Raider is now actually better than it’s ever been, both in terms of narrative and gameplay.

Lara Croft used to be the literal pin-up girl for “video game vixens,” but now she’s just a badass, not meant to titillate in the least. But her appearance is not relevant to the narrative, nor is it spotlighted as eye-candy for the player. She still is, at least by CG-animated beauty standards. It’s not that Lara Croft is no longer attractive.

Nor is she ever made a damsel, as at different points in the game she rescues each of the two main guys in the story. Though the game also features male characters, Croft isn’t forced into a love story, focusing on the mission at hand of, you know, not dying. Gone are the butt-focused camera shots, and there are only a couple of graphic deaths as opposed to the dozens that were present in the last game. While a completionist 'reward outfit' for someone like Croft in other games probably would have been a bikini, when you clear all the game’s tombs to unlock one final ensemble, you’re given what’s essentially a full suit of medieval plate armor. And the outfits that actually gave you bonus perks like faster health regen were ones that put Lara in full military camo like Solid Snake. Out of about ten different outfits I unlocked for Croft over the course of the game, only one was her classic tank top (which manages to be less revealing than ever), and the vast majority of choices were bulky jackets that were more than weather appropriate given that the game mostly takes place in Siberia. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, pretty much all remnants of the past objectification of Lara have been banished. That wasn’t explicitly sexual, but it was a bit creepy all the same. The game also had an almost weird obsession with seeing Croft die in horribly graphic ways after failing gameplay segments or quicktime events.

And yet, most of the game did have her soaking wet in a tank top, and put her in situations where the camera seemed trained on her rear end. There was progress made in the last game, the original reboot that had a teenaged Lara wearing pants and let her keep her athletic build, but shrunk her chest down a few cup sizes from past installments.

Rise of tomb raider lara croft