2013’s Tomb Raider ushered in a groundbreaking new trilogy of adventures for Lara Croft, giving players an incredible game world to explore dominated by one of the franchise’s most terrifying antagonists: Himiko, the immortal Sun Queen of the lost island kingdom of Yamatai.

Lara first encountered Himiko early in her career as an archaeologist and adventurer. Scouring the Pacific aboard the Endurance as part of James Whitman’s expedition in search of Yamatai, Lara and her crewmates became embroiled in a violent storm and shipwrecked on the remote island. There the survivors quickly found themselves up against a threat more dire than they could have ever imagined.

Legends of Yamatai speak of Himiko, a beautiful yet cold-blooded queen with fabled powers who led the island before her eventual death around AD 248. Her subjects believed that she had the ability to transfer her powers to one of her priestesses, the Daughters of the Sun, allowing new queens to reign through the years. But Himiko was secretly Yamatai’s only ruler, able to surreptitiously transfer her soul into younger bodies, prolonging her unnatural life and rule through the ages.

And so Himiko’s reign endured for centuries, her true nature known only to herself and her Stormguard general. Through the years, an aging Himiko would transfer her spirit into the young body of one of her unwitting priestesses, continually perpetuating her eternal reign. This cycle endured for generations until a priestess named Hoshi, realizing the true power of her queen and what fate awaited her, killed herself before the transferal ritual could be completed, corrupting the ceremony and trapping Himiko in her decaying body.

Far from stopping Himiko’s dominion, though, the failed ritual sparked a terrible new power. Unable to die, Himiko’s supernatural rage cursed Yamatai, destroying the island’s kingdom and creating wildly violent storms preventing anyone from escaping.

Eventually including Mathias.

Stranded on the island after a plane crash in 1982, the cunning Mathias came to realize the storms preventing his fellow survivors from escaping held an evil presence. Rather than try hopelessly to leave Yamatai, he instead turned inward, seeking out its most hidden secrets and eventually coming to worship Himiko, whose commands he believed her could hear. By the time Lara and her crew arrived on Yamatai decades later, Mathias had formed a cult of castaways to serve Himiko called the Solarii Brotherhood.

Himiko’s centuries-old wishes for a new body to take over finally came to fruition when the Endurance shipwrecked on Yamatai carrying Samantha Nishimura, Lara’s friend and a long-lost descendant of Himiko’s line who could serve as a suitable vessel for the queen’s malevolent spirit.

Mathias’s cult kidnapped Sam, taking her to the Chamber of the Sun to perform the ritual to transfer Himiko’s spirit to Sam’s body, but the ceremony was thwarted once again, this time by Lara Croft, who killed Mathias and destroyed Himiko’s decayed form, stopping the queen’s reign once and for all. At last, Yamatai’s long nightmare came to an end. With Sam freed and the storms dissipated, Lara led her friends away from the island to safety.

But that was not the end of Himiko’s legend. While Lara succeeded in stopping Himiko from totally transferring over, a small portion of her deathless spirit attached itself to Sam, laying hidden until the ancient queen could make her next play for immortality. These events, and Lara’s final battle to save Sam’s soul from Himiko, are fully chronicled in the Tomb Raider comic series from Dark Horse. Himiko’s legend and the events of the 2013 Tomb Raider game were also loosely adapted for the 2018 Tomb Raider film starring Alicia Vikander.

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Video Games

Tomb Raider (2013)