I've brought this up before, but now I've got much better pics to assist my stance on the matter.
Regarding Bowser, we always refer to his various roles where he's clearly larger than Mario or even towers over him. Though his size has fluctuated considerably and his most official size compared to Mario seems to be closer to what we've seen in Smash, he is still worth considering.
...
Especially his role in the Mario Strikers sports series. Or should I say
roles!
The following shows Bowser as his role of being a "stage hazard" of sorts, dropping down from the sky and interfering with the match.
You can clearly see he's pretty darn big. Definitely larger than any of the playable characters, including Donkey Kong. Note that Mario is about the size of Yoshi (poor thing is traumatized...
).
...And then came Mario Strikers Charged. What happened to Bowser?
OH LOOK, within the
very same series, Bowser's role not only changed from "stage hazard" to playable, he's
scaled down to fit the role!
Sure one can say "But Nintendo always does this with their characters, changing their sizes at a whim..." Which is true... across different series. However, the characters generally remain in a specific role AND are scaled
consistently to fit whichever role they're supposed to play in that particular series. The only other series that's somewhat inconsistent is the primary Super Mario series where Bowser's size does fluctuate. However, Bowser's role remains the same and ultimately is only adjusted to best play out his role as series villain, boss, and whatever the current system technology allows.
But here is a rare moment where Bowser's role is completely changed and thus his size
requires changing in order to make it work.
Ridley ought to be allowed the same treatment! Within the same series (Smash), Ridley has already changed size to fit his role, albeit not all that drastically. SSB64 had a small version of Ridley's SNES sprite hover about the background. Melee had a large yet somewhat plausibly workable Ridley battling Samus in the opening. And Brawl had two different scales for Ridley and one additional scale for Meta-Ridley. All three were considerably large, but their sizes fluctuated slightly to fit the role.
The characters are malleable in order to play the roles. The roles are not exalted over the characters. Heck, it fits in with Nintendo's design philosophy. They don't design characters and then try to shape roles around them. Roles are born out of the creation of new ideas, and characters are either born to play the roles or are contracted and adapted to fit the role. This is a view Nintendo openly exhibits.
It's a philosophy we can only hope Sakurai shares. I think he does to an extent. So far Charizard and Little Mac have moved up from Pokeball and Assist Trophy to playable character. At the same time, their scales underwent pretty minor changes. Ridley being adapted to a playable status would be something new to the series altogether. But I think I proved such a situation not only can work, but has worked before.
We can only hope that Sakurai isn't typecasting Ridley, 'cause that would be the worst-case scenario.
