YMMV / Tomb Raider I

• Breather Level: After the rather challenging "Sanctuary of the Scion", "Natla's Mines" is a breeze by comparison, especially since the first half is largely devoid of enemies and death traps. Then "Atlantis" ratchets up the difficulty all the way to the end of the game.
  • "Colosseum" is a much shorter and easier level than "St. Francis' Folly", especially in Anniversary when the latter can be completed in under ten minutes.
• Complete Monster: Jacqueline Natla was one of the three ruling leaders of Atlantis who, seeing them as weak, used the power of the Scion to warp countless innocents into feral mutants before being sealed away. Freed from a bomb test, Natla tasks Lara Croft with recovering the Scion, while having one of her goons trail her and kill her. Acquiring all the pieces of the Scion, Natla uses an old Atlantean outpost as a breeding factory for mutants, intending on unleashing them on mankind. Viewing evolution as "in a rut", Natla's ambitions reflect her megalomaniacal desire to cull whom she deems as weak.
• Fan Nickname: "Doppelganger" was known early on as "Bacon Lara", and the new and improved Doppelganger is sometimes called "Dopplehoe" or shortened to "Dopple" or "Doppie".
• Narm: It was pretty hard to take Natla and her goons seriously when they all have hilariously stereotypical accents. This was downplayed in the remake.
• Nintendo Hard: The game starts off easy enough, with simple puzzles and platforming, and more than enough ammo and medipacks to cover whatever attacks Lara, but once you get to Egypt, the enemies become harder to die and hit harder, the platforming removes any room for error, and traps become plentiful. In short, it's very easy to die and since it was the very first game of the franchise, there were no veterans nor established clichés and tropes, as the game was Trope Codifier for the entire genre. And of course almost all levels are marathon ones.
• Obvious Beta: Some think the Sega Saturn version is this (especially the European version). The game was always intended to be Multi-Platform, but Sega's contract mandated it as a timed-exclusive in PAL territories for over a month (reportedly three). As a result, development was rushed to meet the deadline and the original Saturn version was missing a few features, including the handstand animation and some areas. The later worldwide Saturn release is somewhat more polished by the addition of some save points, enemy rebalancing, and small adjustments to the level design to match the other versions (among minor things), but even Toby Gard stated that the PlayStation version was the better product. It's a pity - despite the muddier textures, awfully compressed audio and miscellaneous glitches, the improved draw distance and water ripple effects (which were also on PC but not as pronounced) show that it had the potential to be remembered as the superior release.
• Once Original, Now Common: Whereas Super Mario 64 showed how classic platforming could transfer from 2D to 3D earlier in 1996, Tomb Raider fundamentally codified 3D tank controls and a more cinematic flair for exploration, puzzles, combat with a simple auto-lock and more mature adventure in general. If you weren't trying to follow Mario, you were trying to follow Lara Croft, with lots of Tomb Raider clones in the following years trying to refine or rip off what it managed to pull off in the early debut of 3D gaming.
• Signature Scene: Ask a casual player what they remember about Tomb Raider. It'll be the T. Rex.
• That One Boss: The Abomination, AKA the Torso boss at the top of the Great Pyramid. Its grabbing attack is a One-Hit Kill, you can accidentally fall off the platform you're fighting it on, it can withstand hundreds of Uzi bullets and worse yet, just when you've finally killed it, the boss will make one last Desperation Attack: blow up and try to take you down with it, forcing you to start over if you were too close!

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