Dungeon crawler anime Tomb Raider King gets Crunchyroll summer premiere

Tomb Raider King is a Korean webnovel about high-stakes dungeon spelunking that's get an anime in July.

Remember when Sword Art Online’s breakaway popularity spawned a wave of LitRPG imitators and approximately a million protagonists who looked almost exactly like Kirito? It seems that Solo Leveling’s success is doing something similar.

Tomb Raider King (no, this has nothing to do with Lara Croft) is an upcoming anime headed to Crunchyroll on July 6 that has a lot of overlap: It’s also based on a Korean webtoon about a guy who is betrayed while raiding a dungeon, granting him a special hidden ability and a desire for revenge. Crunchyroll just dropped the first trailer for the series, featuring a big CGI dragon and the catchy opening theme “Showdown” by QWER.

The show follows Jooheon Suh, an adventurer who seeks out God's tombs, dungeons that contain powerful relics. After Suh is betrayed by his former employer, he is sent to the past, where he starts on a quest for retribution. Armed with the adventurer’s equivalent of Biff’s almanac, he sets out to claim these powerful relics before anyone else can.

The original Tomb Raider King web novel by Sanji Jiksong began in November 2016 (a few months after Solo Leveling) and was later adapted into a web comic that concluded in 2023. Tapas digitally released the entire series in English (where it has racked up almost 10 million views), while Yen Press is currently releasing a translation in print, with the last of its 16 volumes coming out this October.

Tomb Raider King is being adapted by Studio EEK and directed by Seung Wook Woo, an experienced key animator who has worked on series like One Punch Man, Code Geass, Death Note, Kaji, Monster, and more. Sound direction will be handled by Kisuke Koizumi (Chainsaw Man, Dororo, Summertime Render). Yoshimasa Hosoya (Reiner in Attack on Titan, Wolfwood in Trigun Stampede) will play the main character Suh, while the ever-prolific Saori Hayami (Yor in Spy x Family, Shinobu in Demon Slayer) will voice Holton Irene, the “King of Bankruptcy."

The runaway popularity of Solo Leveling has led to the announcement of many more TV series based on webtoons. Last year, Line CEO Shin-bae Kim said that his company would create 20 new animated adaptations in 2025, with more on the way, like adaptations of Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint and Dark Moon: The Blood Altar.