Macro Zone

In Macro Zone, Goomba stomps you.

"Somebody tell me how I got so SMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!"

— Ventus, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep

An area in a video game where your character is tiny relative to their surroundings. The environment is usually some mundane area like a garden that is rendered interesting by the change in scale. Enemies are more often than not giant insects or old fashioned windup toys. Natural hazards like thorns, giant feet, bouncing balls, and frayed electrical wires are everywhere in these small scale environments.

If your heroes are naturally small, all of the game's levels may be various Macro Zones. Another common scenario is to have your characters shrink temporarily, often to sneak through a small opening, or retrieve an item.

Prehistoric levels may partially be Macro Zones, since everyone knows that the distant past was filled with enormous flesh-eating insects and Man Eating Plants. If your tiny character is inside another creature's body, you also have a Womb Level on your hands.

Named for the Macro Zone in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, where Mario had to work his way through a normal-sized house while the size of a bug. Rarely contains actual macros. For non-game examples, see Incredible Shrinking Man. See also Mouse World. Contrast Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever, which is what happens when your character gets super-big compared to the background, or Kaiju, a subtrope of 50-Foot Whatever, dealing specifically with evoking Japanese-style giant monsters.

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Examples

Games where your character shrinks

• AI: The Somnium Files: Aiba is shrunken down during Ota's somnium at the fishery warehouse.
• Alice has to travel through some wilderness while shrunken in American McGee's Alice.
• Arabian Magic have a stage taking place after you're shrunken by a curse, where you land on a dinner table laden with humungous fruits, meats and with multiple giants dining in the background.
• When Bendy and his friends run away from an apparently-over-sized sentient inkwell in Bendy in Nightmare Run, they run across tables and past bookshelves with books much larger than they are. A successful ending for this episode will show the selected player character dressed like a librarian and scolding a suddenly much-proportionally smaller inkwell boss.
• The second level of Bobby's World takes place underneath Bobby's bed. Bobby has to carefully navigate over pits and climb across horizontal poles with Webbly's assistance.
• Breath of Fire:
  • In the original Breath of Fire game, the party is shrunken down halfway thru a dungeon by one of the Elite Mooks and must take a detour thru a mousehole. Inside, they help out some mice with a roach problem and are rewarded by the rodents with a potion than returns them to normal size.
  • Breath of Fire II has the queen of Tunland, who has been cursed to become very obese. To help her lose weight, the party has to be shrunk down so they can enter her body and literally kill the fat by getting into fights against evil lipid monsters.
• In Donkey Kong 64, Tiny Kong has shrinking as her special ability and at least one of her Golden Bananas in each level involves this ability, whether it be a race against a remote controlled car or entering a door to an otherwise normal room that is really small for no reason.
• The Doom Game Mod Void features a part where your character is shrinked. Now you have to traverse a tiny cave system, fight off spiders, and "press" a button by going into its workings and manipulating the gears.
• Duke Nukem 3D has a shrink ray where you can shrink your opponents and step on them. However, there is one part of the game where Duke has to be shrunk so he can get into one of the areas. Duke Nukem Forever continues this, where certain sections have Duke stepping on a shrinking pad and becoming small, forcing him to platform across a kitchen or drive an RC car until he can find a pad to re-size him.
• Dreamkiller has a Toy Time stage where you turn doll-sized. It's not too obvious at first until you walk under an archway... and realize the "curtains" are used receipts.
• One of the heads available in Dynamite Headdy does this, allowing Headdy to traverse smaller tunnels and the like. The first time even has smaller enemies in those tunnels that never show up anywhere else.
• Fable III includes a quest that has the Hero shrink to play a Dungeons & Dragons knock-off game with some wizard gamers. While the level itself is also scaled to your size (as it's a model set up to simulate the adventure), at the end, you can see the wizards that talked you into the quest, in all their humongous glory.
• Final Fantasy III has a number of dungeons where the party has to be shrunk via the "Mini" spell to pass through, with ordinary creatures now proving a dire threat. Unless you've got magic. This also occurs in Final Fantasy IV Advance in the Lunar Ruins.
• There is a Half-Life custom level where you get shrinked and have to traverse a living room and a kitchen, fighting miniature soldiers while hiding behind furniture, watching out for mousetraps and jumping on drawers to make your way to the floor. The original level was called Rats! and had you inside a kitchen, and there were other "rats" levels in a similar vein depicting a young boy's bedroom, as well as a living room. The levels had various mouse holes that allowed you to traverse between the rooms and inside the walls.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The Wonderland level in Kingdom Hearts has both the Bizarre Room and the Lotus Forest for the characters to explore (and be attacked by swarms of enemies) while shrunk. Both areas can also be experienced while normal-sized, but there's not much to do at that scale.
  • Birth by Sleep has the Tremaine residence in the Castle of Dreams, which is only accessible when the characters are shrunken (Ventus for the entirety of his stay, Aqua courtesy of the Fairy Godmother). Unversed are also appropriately shrunken.
  • Kingdom Hearts III has Sora, Donald and Goofy transforming into action figures while visiting the Toy Box.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap revolves around quests and puzzles where Link often must shrink down to a tiny size. Overlaps with Mouse World.
• Mickey Mouse games:
  • In Land of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, Mickey can gain the ability to shrink and sneak through small tunnels once he recovers the Shrinking Potion from the Castle Ruins. Sometimes, he can use this to quickly go over blocks that the game expects him to pick up and throw out of the way.
  • Disney's Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse: Upon being shrunken down by a witch-shaped doll, Mickey has to explore the areas mini-sized. This includes boarding a toy train, inserting the plug into the socket to turn the TV on (which he previously was unable to do so due to his size), and being chased by the ghost-possessed rubber duck before boarding a toy airplane and chasing the ghost into a cloud picture which serves as an Unexpected Shmup Level. Upon completion of the minigame (or failing certain quick time events prior to boarding the plane), Mickey is eventually restored back to his normal size.
• Ōkami has a large area in the Imperial Palace where a miniature Amaterasu has to make her way through a garden, into the castle, and ultimately to a showdown in the Emperor's belly. Later, she must also shrink down to enter the habitat of the Poncles.
• Psychonauts:
  • Waterloo World, a mental realm in which Raz begins as the same size relative to the realm's host, Fred Bonaparte, and the mental image of his ancestor, Napoléon Bonaparte. The Bonapartes are locked in combat over a wargame, symbolizing Fred's madness over not living up to the Bonaparte name. Raz's objective is to help Fred defeat Napoleon, which he does by climbing into the large board game and shrinking down to the size of the soldier pieces, which enables him to move them as he needs to play the game. Raz also shrinks even further, to the point that the formerly small soldier pieces now tower over Raz like the Eiffel tower, and fights enemies to get the items he needs on the board to win the game.
  • When you're at the smallest size possible, you're able to walk to one of the buildings on the board and look into its windows...and the room inside is the room you're in at the largest size. Lungfishopolis on the other hand inverts this trope by having Raz becoming kaiju-sized and rampaging through the city.
• Return to Zork has a Timed Mission in which the player must retrieve an item from a ship in a bottle.
• For an in-universe example, one of the stages in the game in Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase is set in a backyard where the characters are shrunk down.
• The Nintendo 64 game Snowboard Kids 2 features a level where the kids become tiny and snowboard through the house of one of the characters.
• Sonic CD has a point in the final area of the last level where Sonic (or Tails if you're playing the 2011 remake) gets hit by a shrinking laser, and travels through Robotnik's fortress while tiny until he jumps into a grow ray.
  • When said level, Metallic Madness, returned in Sonic Mania, so did the shrink rays. You even fight the boss while you're still tiny!
• SoulBlazer featured a level where the hero shrunk down to fight evil toy soldiers on a model of a town.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins: The world map shows Mario entering the trope-naming Macro Zone through a cave system that shrinks him on the way towards the house.
  • Paper Mario 64 has Shy Guy's Toy Box, which shrinks Mario as he jumps inside it.
  • Mario Party DS: Bowser uses his Minimizer to shrink Mario and his friends, so they have to travel to Bowser's castle to defeat Bowser and reverse the spell. In keeping with the game's theme of Mario and his friends being shrunken, the five boards are Wiggler's Garden, Toadette's Music Room, DK's Stone Statue, Kamek's Library, and Bowser's Pinball Machine. Several minigames also take place within mundane, normal-sized objects or locations that only seem big due to the main characters' reduced size.
  • Mario Adventure: Done as a Nostalgia Level for World 6, which is made of giant-sized Nostalgia Levels.
• Tales of Symphonia has the Meltokio Sewers, where the character's ring gives them the power to shrink. This lets them sneak through grates and walk on small pathways or spider webs. They also can sneak into mouse holes to get items, but have to fight the relatively giant mice. Oddly, those battles are easier than when the mice are tiny, since the giant mice are easier to hit and juggle.
• The Legion edition of Karazhan - now a five-person instance - in World of Warcraft has a section where this happens. Upon first entering a circular library/archive room, the party is shrunk down so much that your next boss - the Mana Devourer - is revealed to be a run-of-the-mill mana wyrm once it dies and you're returned to regular size.

Games where the enemies and scenery are oversized

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has the Den of Behemoths, a larger version of the Garden of Silence that features enemies from earlier parts of the game, just gigantic. Even the treasure chests are bigger. The scaled-up enemies lead to entertainingly glitchy visual interactions with some shards, like how Shurikens will quintuple in size upon hitting their target.
• Bramble: The Mountain King, a platformer where you're a young boy in a series of hills inhabited by giant trolls. Naturally, everything is giant-sized, which the poster and promotional materials highlights.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros. 3 is where this trope was introduced to the Mario franchise. World 4 is called "Giant Land", with tons of oversized enemies and scenery. One level in this world has doors between normal and giant copies of the same level.
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins does both version of this trope, mixing it with other settings. One world is a gigantic tree, the Tree Zone, in which Mario must battle oversized insects; another world, known as the Mario Zone, is a mechanical statue of Mario inhabited by larger-than-life toys and moving parts.
  • Super Mario 64 has Tiny-Huge Island. There are two versions of the level, one where everything is tiny, and the other, where everything is much larger, with no properly-scaled option. The two sizes can be switched via the pipes throughout the level.
  • Super Mario Galaxy: The Toy Time Galaxy is a unique flavor of Macro Zone, taking place on a series of oversized toys floating in space in what appears to be a gigantic playroom.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2: Supermassive Galaxy is a probable nod to the abundance of this trope in the Mario series. It is the first level of World 4, which is analoguous to Super Mario Bros. 3 having Giant Land as its own World 4.
  • Mario Kart 8:
    • One of the DLC tracks is GBA Ribbon Road, which now takes place in a child's bedroom, much like Toy Time Galaxy.
    • Wave 5 of the Booster Course Pass for 8 Deluxe introduces a brand-new track called Squeaky Clean Sprint, which takes place in a giant bathroom.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash: The Sacred Forest has areas where everything is massive compared to Mario, and areas where Mario is the giant. The changes in size were caused by Kamek's magic changing the sizes of each area.
• Final Fantasy Legend II features a Giant's Village with oversized buildings and furniture.
• A hell of a lot of levels in Lemmings 2: The Tribes are filled with oversized objects going along the theme of the particular tribe.
• Vexx has the Tempest Peak Manor, a giant house. As in, it explicitly belonged to a giant. It also has a bonus Band Land sublevel, inside—what else?—the enormous piano.
• Banjo-Kazooie:
  • Click Clock Wood in the original game is a blend of normal-sized and giant-sized elements, with the giant-sized ones being more dominant overall. Some other levels, such as Mad Monster Mansion for instance, have oversized portions as well.
  • Banjo-Tooie: Part of Cloud Cuckooland takes place inside a giant trash can filled with oversized trash.
  • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: Logbox 720 is the innards of a giant Xbox 360 pastiche. The architecture is obviously exaggerated, but it shows some game discs running in it, including Grabbed by the Ghoulies.
• The Lost Underworld in EarthBound (1994). You're normal-sized kids, but the world is titanic. And there's dinosaurs.
• The Dinotropolis levels in Fur Fighters features otherwise-benign household settings scaled up to dinosaur size.
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the mad wizard Arkved's tower features rooms with huge tables, chairs and beds; there is also some oversized furniture in White Gold Tower's basement.
• In Thief Gold, there is an extra are in Constantine's mansion with giant furniture. You get there from another area with a miniature town, right after you travel through a pipe...
• In the PS1 version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, the secret level, Little Big World is one of these, taking place on the worktop of somebody's kitchen.
• Wiggler Park in Mario Golf: World Tour, full of tree-sized plants and enemies of a similar scale.
• The first few stages of Clive 'N' Wrench sees the titular duo shrunken to a fraction of their sizes and exploring a giant-sized mansion. One scene in a kitchen notably have cans of baked beans as tall as Clive, for starters.
• In Castle of Illusion, a giant study or library forms part of the fourth level of the Genesis version and the entirety of the fourth level of the Master System version. The 2013 remake also has the reimagined version of Toyland, which is now set in a giant playroom.
• The Realm of the Fey from Miitopia, featuring blades of grass that tower over your Miis, humongous lotus flowers, and lilypads on which Miis can walk.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • The final zone of Shadowbringers, the ruins of the Ancient city of Amaurot, is massive, making you look like an ant compared to everything there. All the structures and NPCs in the area are a good dozen feet high or so, and the local NPCs assume you're a child because of how small you are compared to them (even a Roegadyn just barely reaches their knees.
  • An accidental example also appears in Endwalker, for much the same reason as the aforementioned Shadowbringers zone. The Loporrits constructed Bestway Burrow to be a refuge for the people of Hydaelyn, but operated under the assumption that they were all on the scale of the Ancients (and since the Watcher was created in their image, they had an accurate point of reference for it).
• In My House, the Brutalist House has two variations interconnected with each other; the normal-size version inhabited by a friendly German Shepard, and a twice-as-large version with a two-headed Hell Hound, likely representing the perspective of a child.

Games where your character is naturally small

• It Takes Two (2021): The main characters, May and Cody, have had their minds transferred into dolls, and spend the game navigating through their now-gigantic-to-them house (as well as their toolshed, garden, and a tree in their backyard) in search of a way to return to normal.
• PAYDAY 2: Lab Rats, an event heist released for Halloween 2015, takes place inside the meth lab in from Rats/Cook Off, with both the heisters and cops shrunken to tiny sizes, and the heisters attempting to cook meth. The Necro-Cloaker (returning from Prison Nightmare) and a giant spider may appear during the heist as well.
• Pikmin and its sequels, which feature a tiny race trying to survive in the undergrowth. In fact, the instruction booklet for the first two games in the series shows Captain Olimar to be around the size of a US Quarter. Without his helmet and its tall antenna, he's three-quarters of an inch tall. The Pikmin themselves are around the size of pennies, including their "stem."
• Chipmonk! is set in a medieval-inspired world where every single character are andromorphic rodents. You take control of a chipmunk warrior, who goes on to do battle against a forest full of rodents, badgers, gophers, moles, squirrels and all sorts of rodent-themed enemies.
• Glimmer In Mirror sees you playing as a seed-sized earth fairy, so regular beetles looks like Big Creepy-Crawlies from your perspective.
• Hoa, since you're a thumb-sized fairy creature exploring a forest floor. You use toadstools and caterpillars as springboards and rides a dandelion at one point.
• Hypercharge Unboxed, a game where you're an action figure coming to life fighting other rogue toys, have the toilet, toy store and warehouse levels where sinks, shelves, buckets and other common household objects are huge from your POV.
• Army Men: The games started out in their own fictional world where everything is sized relative to the plastic soldiers, but then at the end of the first game the protagonist discovers a portal to our world, where they are the size of plastic soldiers compared to everything else.
• Spider: The Video Game: Each and every single area is regular-sized, but as you're a regular-sized spider all the onscreen insect enemies are the same size or larger than you. From kitchen sinks to lab tables and pipes under sinks.
• The Spirit And The Mouse, where you're the mouse, in a human-sized world. You spend the whole game running through giant environments, like alongside gutters and jumping across humungous tables.
• Katamari Damacy: The early levels and early parts of some later levels are along these lines due to the fact that the Prince is only a few centimeters tall, but because the game focuses not on you but on the ball you're rolling, you become the giant in no time.
• Team Fortress 2: Several custom levels are set amongst children's toys, as if the characters were toys themselves. One map that deserves special mention is the map "billiards", in which the goal itself is directly related to the setting: You're on a pool table, trying to knock your team's colored balls into the pockets before the other team can do so with theirs. There's even a scoreboard on the wall keeping track.
• Toy Fighter is a fighting game where your characters are all toys - from a stuffed bunny to a Gundam-knockoff to an asskicking Barbie. As such, every single arena from an attic to interiors of a drawer and a toy town appears giant-sized.
• Bad Mojo feature a very disturbing variation on the usual setup. Instead of playing as an adorable little wind-up toy or a talking mouse in cute pants while you explore a colorful toy shop or a quaint suburban home, you play as a cockroach making his way through a disgustingly filthy tenement packed with dead rats, rotten food, and other assorted Nausea Fuel out the wazoo.
• Buck Bumble, where you play a cyborg bee and fly through a garden.
• Micro Machines: The premise of the games, based on the miniature toy cars, is racing in environments such as a garden, a tub, and on a pool table.
• Spyro the Dragon games sometimes include Sparx Worlds, where the little dragonfly sidekick goes off by himself; in these, the enemies are spiders or other "big" bugs that Spyro could probably eat with one bite, but Sparx needs to shoot.
• Twisted Metal: In Twisted Metal Small Brawl, you use RC cars rather than real ones.
• Blockland: You play as a small toy man, similar to a Lego minifigure. (And in the old Alpha version, you WERE a Lego minifigure.)
• Henrys House puts the player in the role of then newborn Prince Harry exploring Windsor Castle.
• The LEGO Movie Videogame features a bonus area set in a real-life kid's bedroom where your characters are the size of an actual LEGO minifigure. Specifically, it belongs to Finn, the child "controlling" Emmet and friends who was Adapted Out of the video game.
• LEGO Dimensions has a "Mystery Dimension" set on a desk in Joel McHale's house. Not a minifigure version of Joel McHale, the actual Joel McHale from real life.
• Super Smash Bros.: Certain stages have all the characters and items suddenly become a lot smaller. Sometimes this is done to fit with the source material (like for stages based on Pikmin) and sometimes it's done for gameplay purposes (like the Nintendogs and Gamer stages, which take place in areas that would be far too cramped if the characters were regular size).
• I Am Bread is a game where you are bread. An ordinary slice of bread, in ordinary environments, hoping to become toast. Everything, including the bread, is pretty accurately sized.
• Tyler: Model 005 is set in a game where you play as a tiny robot in a normal-sized crumbling house.
• Toy Story and Toy Story 2 revolve around this trope, as the toys are naturally smaller than what, for humans, is a normal-sized world.
• Bug Fables takes place in a backyard as a group of sentient bugs, with several of the areas being mundane human objects "upscaled" from the lens of them. To them, a sandbox is a vast desert, a patch of tall grass makes a jungle and swamp, a puddle is practically a sea complete with its own islands (an artificial one made from the cap of a tire and a patch of dirt that resembles a tropical island), and the house is regarded as a mysterious no man's land considered the most dangerous place to be. The house really is the most dangerous location in their world, but not because of any humans. It is infested with bizarre monsters.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers and its sequel have you play as the two titular chipmunks, so every level in the games are big to them. However, the games have rather odd scales. Some levels, particularly the ones where the chipmunks interact with human-sized objects make it look like the other characters are much smaller than the chipmunks, more to the size of insects, such as Fat Cat's Casino, where the slot machines and tables appear human-sized.

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