Evil Is Bigger / Video Games

• In most sci-fi FPS shooters the evil alien race is usually 6'6 to 8'0 tall on average (Elites, Brutes, Promethean Knights, Space Pirates, Xenian Grunts, Ceph Grunts, Super Mutants, Imps, Chimera Hybrids, Locust Drones, etc.), with their Giant Mook members being even larger. Often this makes them easier to shoot, without really making them any stronger.
• Beat'em ups such as Final Fight and Double Dragon often have a Giant Mook such as the Andores or Abobos and there are large bosses like Sodom and whatnot. These are even larger than your own Big Guy such as Mike Haggar, who's one of the tallest Beat'em up heroes ever.
• Nearly every enemy in the Souls series (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Armored Core, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring) is huge, with bosses usually varying from 8 feet tall to outright Kaiju sized. This was played up more as the series went on: in the first few games, an enemy type being around seven feet denoted them as Elite Mooks, while the basic humanoid opposition was around the player's size. Starting with Bloodborne, even basic mooks were nearly seven feet tall with bulk to match, while the elites started around that size and could go over ten feet (like the Cathedral Knights). Apparently, the knights of Lothric consist entirely of Gregor Clegane clones. This has a gameplay purpose: a lot of the strategy of these games rely on learning enemy movesets and reading them so you can dodge/block/parry/deflect appropriately, and a foe being much larger than you makes that easier.
• Although averted with the less powerful enemies, Bendy and the Ink Machine has "Bendy" being the height of a very tall human, which contrasts with the height of his character's cut-outs, which are around three feet tall.
  • The nasty "Alice" is also significantly taller than her cut-out.
• In Bendy in Nightmare Run, all the bosses are big enough to eat the playable characters. Subverted with Dewey, as the playable characters appear to have been shrunken down to create a Macro Zone - the final victory scene will show the player character dressed as a librarian and scolding a suddenly much-smaller Dewey.
• Dawn of War: Averted for the most part due to Units Not to Scale (A very tall human reaches up to the bottom of a Space Marine's Shoulders of Doom, here every infantry unit is around the same size), played straight for the humanoid top-tier units (Daemon Prince, Bloodthirster, Avatar of Khaine). The best example is the first game's Daemon Prince Sindri Myr, who clomps around with a selection circle the size of most buildings. If flyers had been present then, they'd probably be around his waist.
• Played straight in Dragon Age: Inquisition. The Elder One is something like nine feet tall, ensuring he'll tower over the Player Character regardless of which race you pick. When he first appears, there's a moment where he picks up the Inquisitor one-handed and throws them around like a rag-doll.
• Dragon Ball Fighterz plays with this the same way its parent series does. The story Big Bad, Android 21, is actually a little smaller than most of the heroes and is the same size as the true protagonist, Android 21's good side. Most of the heroes stances bend their legs so that the villains stand taller. And the more neutral Super Broly is only in his Berserk form to the really evil movie Broly's Legendary Super Saiyan so he stands nearly twice as tall.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest III: Zoma varies in appearance, being usually in the ballpark of ten to twenty feet, but the point is always the same: Zoma is huge.
  • Dragon Quest XI: Even in his normal form, Mordegon towers over most of the cast. Jasper, for example, barely reaches his chest. Upon absorbing the Heart of Yggdrasil, he mutates into a large muscular demon. And when unleashing the Sword of Shadows' full power, he transforms into a giant skeletal serpent.
• As apex predators, the monsters of Evolve are definitely large, with the smallest among them being six meters tall and the largest nearly four times that. Their size is directly proportional to the threat they pose, since they get a power and health boost every time they grow.
• Fallout: while the human foes are obviously around the same size as the player and their allies, the Super Mutants are around eight feet tall, in true sci-fi shooter tradition.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In the 2D games, enemy sprites in battle were always bigger than the player sprites, even if they were the same size as the party when outside battle. (For example, Golbez in the fourth game, Gilgamesh in the fifth, and Kefka - during the boss battle in the Mines - in the sixth).
  • It's a general rule in the series that villains are, on average, larger than heroes. It's thrown into sharp relief for Dissidia Final Fantasy: the only villain/hero pair where the villain is smaller/shorter than the hero is Squall and Ultimecia, because Squall has movie-star proportions while Ultimecia may be tall, but still a woman.
  • Most of the raid bosses in Final Fantasy XIV are huge mostly out of necessity. Raids involve 8 or 24 players and with that many players all attacking at once, it would be almost impossible to see the boss among the chaos if they were only as big as the players.
• Genshin Impact has most of the enemies larger than the playable characters. This is even more noticeable with the main character being at most midsized with the male traveler and shorter as the female. The only exceptions are those that have a Heel–Face Turn and become playable. This can be seen with the contrast between Tartaglia and Signora. Tartaglia is as tall as the adult male characters while Signora dwarfs him. He became playable while she died.
• In the God of War series, Kratos is a simply huge man — seven and a half feet in the original Greek era's art style and a more grounded but still towering six and a half feet in the Norse era's more realistic engine — but most of the foes he faces are still substantially larger than he is; gods tower over him and even the human warlords he fights exceed his stature.
  • The Olympian gods are, as mentioned, usually larger than Kratos but still operate at a roughly human scale, though they have the ability to grow to a giant size and some stay that way all the time. The Titans, generally considered to be the villains in stories about the Olympians, are literally the size of mountains at well over 1,000 feet tall; the giant-sized Olympians come nowhere close.
• In the Gradius series, bosses are gigantic, no exceptions. Your fighter has to fight giant spaceships a hundred times its size, huge statues, giant fiery dragons, and brain-like abominations of the Bacterion Empire the size of small planets.
• Half-Life: Alien Grunts and Shock Troopers, the primary alien foot soldiers, are each around seven feet tall, though Alien Slaves, Alien Controllers, Alien Aircraft, and Gargantuas are all actually smaller than their human counterparts.
• Halo
  • The Elites and Brutes (the Covenant's two main Elite Mook species) respectively average at about eight and nine feet tall, while the Hunters are twelve feet tall. By contrast, even the average height of humanity's heavily-augmented SPARTAN Super Soldiers is usually "only" a little over seven feet tall while in full armor^note Master Chief, for example, is 2.083 m (6'10") out of armor, and 2.18 m (7'2") in armor; even Jorge-052, one of the tallest Spartans to be shown in the games, is "merely" 2.235 m (7'4") out of armor^note Though he's roughly 2.438 m (8 ft) while armored. As a side note, the game Jorge was introduced made the Elites, Brutes, and Hunters even bigger (or more accurately, was the first game in the series to finally depict Elites, Brutes, and Hunters as being the same size as what the manuals had always claimed they were).
  • Double subverted with the Covenant's Grunts. They seem diminutive compared to the Super-Soldier protagonist, and indeed, the guides say that they average about five feet tall... but they're also very bulky so they end up being bigger than humans on average regardless (240-260 lbs per the guides).
  • The Covenant's Jackals and Drones play with this; both species are on average somewhat taller and heavier than baseline humans, with the former also generally more agile and the latter stronger and more resilient, but both species are small, weak, and frail compared to the augmented and power-armored Spartan protagonists of the series, and the Jackal are even more fragile than baseline humans due to their hollow bones. Then played straight with the Skirmishers, a Jackal subspecies, who are both taller/heavier than humans and MUCH stronger, enough to clear a three story building In a Single Bound.
  • While the Covenant's main political leaders, the Prophets, average at about seven feet, as a rule they're frail and a bit hunchbacked due to their sedentary lifestyle.
  • The Big Bad of Halo 4, the Ur-Didact, is over 11.4 feet tall, as befitting the former leader of the Forerunners' Warrior-Servants. Additionally, his main Elite Mooks, the Promethean Knights, average about ten feet tall. Most of the other mechanical Forerunner Mecha-Mooks in the series are also pretty big, but, with the exception of the vehicle-sized Enforcers and the Spartan-sized Soldiers, are dwarfed by the main protagonists.
  • The Warden Eternal, introduced in Halo 5: Guardians, controls a bunch of giant robot bodies who absolutely dwarf the Spartans.
  • Covenant ships are absolutely enormous compared to their UNSC equivalents. The mainline UNSC equivalents (usually constituting 90%+ of their fleets) are what they call frigates and destroyers (plus even smaller support craft), averaging around 500 meters and a million tons. Meanwhile, a Covenant "frigate" or corvette is a kilometer long ship massing 8-10 million tons, while their light destroyers are ~1,500 meters. Meanwhile, human cruisers are a little over a kilometer long and 8-9 million tons; Covenant cruisers (at least heavy cruisers and battlecruisers) are around two kilometers and a hundred million tons. This doesn't seem to make them much tougher though, as one to three MAC rounds still kill the vast majority of Covenant ships regardless, even when launched by a ship 1/100 their size.
• In Infinity Blade, almost everything is bigger than you, except the final boss.
• Jitsu Squad have most of their bosses being roughly your size, or at least a couple times larger. And then there's the final form of Lord Origami, the game's primary villain, who's an utter monster that takes up the whole background.
• Legend of Keepers has you as the bad guy and all 3 of your possible choices will be roughly twice the height of the human heroes entering your dungeons. Lira the Monkey Engineer was a regular monkey that got uplifted, now she's at least 10 feet tall. Special note also goes to Maug the Slaveholder Centaur. Whereas Lira and Sarel the Dryad Enchantress have somewhat reasonable excuses for being evil (Lira wants to go after the Dungeon scientists that created her - she likes the unrivalled intelligence but resents the various experiments on her that came with it. Meanwhile Sorel was partially created by the power of 25 Fae Queens angry about how humans are destroying the dryads's forest. Maug is the evillest and biggest of the 3 Masters, he enjoys eating humans and torturing people in his dungeons for fun - being a slaver is his personality.
• Halo's predecessor, Marathon, featured the Pfhor, an organization of alien slavers and their slaves. Most Pfhor are slightly taller but thinner than humans, however their Hunters are much larger. Humans stand at about the abdomen of the average hunter, while the largest ones are over twice as tall as a human. Then there are the enormous Pfhor juggernauts, which are flying cybernetic tanks. Meanwhile, the S'pht, a species that the Pfhor enslaved, are relatively small. Averted with the largest creature in the Pfhor, the Drinniol, which, being a slave, bears no ill will towards its victims.
• Mass Effect:
  • The Reapers are absolutely massive in size; the standard Sovereign-class Reaper is over two kilometers long and masses well over a hundred million tons, in a universe where typical warships like cruisers are around 400 to 700 meters in length and flagships (dreadnoughts and carriers) average a little over a kilometer. The Reapers also have firepower and defenses to match, with a single Sovereign-class considered a match for four conventional dreadnoughts per the third game's codex' but there are thousands of Sovereigns and only a couple hundred conventional capital ships at the time they invade. Reaper Destroyers are much smaller at 160 meters, but are still somewhat larger than the good guys' equivalents, that is corvettes and frigates (which are around 150 meters and not as thickly armored). And compared to the ground forces they sometimes go up against (as their secondary role is walking on planets to support Reaper armies), Destroyers are basically Kaiju, and also have defenses to match. Anything less than constant orbital bombardment or reengineered Reaper weapons to a Destroyer's weak point are basically the equivalent of throwing rocks at them.
  • As a general rule, if there are two forces involved and one of them has something huge — a Brute, Praetorian, YMIR mech, Geth Colossus or Atlas mech, just to name five — then the force with the huge thing is the bad guy.
• Krut: The Mythic Wings have the stone ogres, an Always Chaotic Evil race of rock monsters already larger than average humans. Their leader, Zurah, in particular is a kaiju who can stomp buildings underfoot.
• Nintendo is an avid user of this trope, example include:
  • All over Kid Icarus: Uprising with most of the bosses being at least several stories tall compared to the rather diminuative Pit.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Ganon is always bigger than Link and Zelda combined. Even in his human form, Ganondorf (as shown in the trope image), he can be up to twice as tall as them regardless of whether Link and Zelda are adults or kids. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, he's even noticeably taller than his fellow, less evil Gerudo. Funnily enough, the Gerudo did end up being portrayed with the same 7+ foot adult height as Ganondorf in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the same game where they Took a Level in Kindness and consider Ganondorf's Gerudo origins a shameful mark upon their tribe's honor.
    • Alongside Ganondorf (especially in his Ganon form) all the bosses and minibosses in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess are bigger than Link to various degrees: the most downplayed examples are King Bulblin and Zant (who are one head taller than Link) while the most exaggerated case is Morpheel (who's a massive Fiendish Fish).
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Ghirahim plays this straight when he goes One-Winged Angel, where he's about a head taller than Link and noticeably bulkier (in his normal form he and Link are the same size). Demise plays it straight even in his humanoid form where he's around the same height as Ganon's human form, but is also much bulkier with his arms alone being thicker than Link's torso.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: As a rule, the monsters are quite big. Bokoblins, the smallest humanoid monsters, are about a head taller than Link when standing upright. In their default hunched posture, where they're bent nearly double, Lizalfos are tall enough that Link can stand under them with the top of his head about touching their chins. Moblins are around three times Link's height, and Lynels nearly the size of elephants. Even the batlike Keese, the smallest monsters, have bodies bigger than Link's head.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Ganondorf, as ever, towers over most of the protagonists in the game, but this really becomes evident when he transforms into the Demon Dragon during the final boss battle. His dragon form is absolutely gargantuan, far, far, larger than the benevolent Light Dragon (who is Zelda transformed) that aids Link in the fight, or the non-hostile Spirit Dragons, which are all already very large.
• Octopath Traveler and Octopath Traveler II use small 16-bit-style sprites for all human characters outside of battle, making most characters approximately the same size as each other. However, during battle, the party members continue to use the same sprite style as the overworld, while the bosses suddenly gain vastly larger and more detailed sprites that are several times bigger than the entire party combined.
• Rengoku: Mars, Sphinx and Alcmaeon bosses in the second have a unique body shape that is a couple times larger than any ADAM.
• Resident Evil Village has Lady Dimitrescu, who is the ruler of Castle Dimitrescu and the de facto ruler/owner of the village that the castle overlooks. At 9'6, she is not only the biggest non-mutated enemy in the game, but in the franchise as a whole.
• Romancing StellaVisor: As a Fan Remake of Hoshi wo Miru Hito, the battle HUD has been revamped, allowing for the vast majority of enemies and bosses to have much bigger sprites than the player party. This is especially noticeable in one late-game boss fight against a possessed Aine — the character's sprite drastically increases in size once they become the boss.
• The Space Pirate Ridley of Metroid is always much larger than his Arch-Enemy, Samus Aran. His size usually varies between each game in the series, sometimes reaching up to almost twenty feet in Metroid: Zero Mission, but even in his smaller appearances (like the intro for Super Smash Bros. Melee, his playable appearance in Ultimate, and the original Metroid, for example), he still towers over her. He's still dwarfed by other pirates such as Kraid or Phantoon, as well as his boss in the Zebes-based games, Mother Brain.
  • Metroid generally designs its villains to be much larger than Samus due to them being aliens and thus having a different builds compared to a standard human. Dark Samus and the SA-X are the notable exceptions to the rule since they are clones of Samus and thus they're the same size as her. When the SA-X goes One-Winged Angel, it becomes a lot bigger.
• In Super Mario Bros. games, Mario's enemies usually are bigger than he is:
  • This goes as far as Donkey Kong, where he is a tiny carpenter against the titular giant gorilla.
  • While his size varies from game to game, Bowser is always bigger than Mario and the other protagonists.
  • In his first appearance in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Wario is massive — several times Mario's size. Going from villain to Anti-Hero after this game apparently shrank him down a bit.
  • While Luigi is slightly taller than Mario, he still fights against taller antagonists, from his rival Waluigi to his nemesis King Boo (starting from Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, as he was only bigger than regular Boos in the first iteration).
  • Spin-off antagonists often follow this rule too to various degrees: the Lean and Mean Cackletta, Princess Shroob (who's the same size as Princess Peach, and her elder sister is even bigger), Grodus (who appears taller because of his computer head), and many others. There are exceptions though, like Tatanga, a tiny alien in a spaceship, or Fawful, who's as tiny as a Toad (but who's hijacked by the Dark Star is its Dark Bowser form and whose spiky hair makes slightly taller than Bowser).
• In the Super Smash Bros. series, even though they are often shrunken down for balancing purposes compared to their home series, some of the playable villain characters usually find a way to still be bigger than their nemesis since they are usually heavy-weight fighters. A notable exception is King K. Rool in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. While K. Rool was usually bigger than the Kongs in his own series, Donkey Kong is also a heavy-weight fighter in Smash, putting them at roughly the same size.
• In Octopath Traveler (said by the producers to be a Spiritual Successor to Final Fantasy VI), end-of-chapter bosses are shown to be the same size and super-deformed style as your party members outside of combat, but highly detailed and realistically-proportioned sprites that stretch nearly the height of the screen when in combat. Even normal human enemies in fights are twice as tall as your characters. (The exception is when you "Challenge" or "Provoke" someone in a town; those fights use the tiny overworld sprite for the enemy, possibly because they're not evil, and the fight isn't to the death)
• Resistance: Chimera units are taller than normal humans.
• In the Shank duology, almost every boss (and even a few mooks) are bigger or at least taller than the titular Shank. While this is averted for some characters in the cutscenes, some of them actually are that big. It's almost impressive how many giants the bad guys can get under their employ.
• Dr. Eggman, from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, stands about twice as tall as the heroes (just over six feet, as opposed to Sonic, who stands at 3'3").
• Star Shift Origins: The TRS Raven under Kern's command is responsible for changing the timeline to one where the Terran Republic is turned into the tyrannical Earth Systems Alliance. The Raven is also bigger than its sister ship, the TRS Dauntless, which is under the party's control. As a twist, during the time skip, the original Dauntless crew takes control of the Raven while the ESA steals the Dauntless, which inverts the dynamic. However, during The Stinger, an unknown faction steals the Dauntless from the ESA.
• M. Bison of Street Fighter is a man of very large stature, especially in the Alpha series, though Zangief and Sagat are always bigger than him.
• In Sword of the Stars II, the Suul'ka, Liir Great Elders gone mad, even the smallest of which are bigger than any other races' Leviathans.
• Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron averted this due to the Autobots and Decepticons sharing animation models for characters and enemies, which meant they were usually typically close in size, and in the case of the latter game, the Autobots had the larger GiantMooks with their Titans and also had Metroplex who was by far the largest character in either game, and also had one of the few cases of Optimus Prime being larger than Megatron.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt the Warriors of the titular Wild Hunt stand a head and shoulders taller than normal humanoids. At one point one of their ranks is seen outside his suit of armour, confirming that this is indeed the natural size for some of the Alder Folk, accentuating their otherworldly nature.
• Archimonde in the final level in Warcraft III is far larger than any other unit and is basically invincible. In addition, all the demonic units have far more health than the player's units or his computer allies', are physically larger, and do "chaos damage" which is resisted by none of the armor types.
  • Present in World of Warcraft with dungeon and raid bosses. Anywhere from five to forty players need to be able to target and track their actions so the bosses are bigger. This ranges from bosses being twice as tall as normal (even if there something that's normally human sized) to behemoths so large they don't fit on the screen unless you're as far away as possible.
• The Wonderful 101: All officers of GEATHJERK except Wanna are about the size of a small building, and almost all of their mechs and warships are outright gigantic. The only exceptions are the basic fodder enemies and the Guyzoch Space Pirates, which are of equal size to the Wonderful Ones. Even when the CENTINELS get access to large mechs (a Gah-Goojin in Operation 005-C, then Platinum Robo in Operation 008-C), the bosses fought in them are even bigger. Technically, Vaaiki is microscopic, yet the team fights it while they are shrunk down, so from their perspective it appears to be huge (which is lampshaded by Wonder-Blue and Wonder-Green before the fight).
• It's quite common for the Final Boss of a Fighting Game to be much larger than most of the playable characters. Examples include Shao Kahn and Onaga (Mortal Kombat), Bison and Seth (Street Fighter), Heihachi, Jinpachi, Ogre and Azazel (Tekken).