Macro Zone



An area in a video game where your character is tiny relative to his 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 Six 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.

Games where your character shrinks

 * The Trope Namer, Super Mario Land 2 Six Golden Coins. The world map shows Mario entering the Macro Zone through a cave system that shrinks him on the way towards the house.
 * The first Paper Mario has Shy Guy's Toy Box, which shrinks Mario as he jumps inside it.
 * Sonic CD has a point in the final area of the last level where Sonic gets hit by a shrinking laser, and travels through Robotnik's fortress while tiny until he jumps into a grow ray.
 * Okami 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.
 * 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.
 * Soul Blazer featured a level where the hero shrunk down to fight evil toy soldiers on a model of a town.
 * 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.
 * Alice has to travel through some wilderness while shrunken in American McGee's Alice.
 * 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.
 * Return to Zork has a Timed Mission in which the player must retrieve an item from a ship in a bottle.
 * Donkey Kong 64's 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 something lame like the door to an otherwise normal room is really small for no reason.
 * In the original Breath of Fire I 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Harley's Humongous Adventure

Games where the enemies and scenery are oversized

 * Again in Super Mario Land 2: one level is a gigantic tree in which Mario must battle oversized insects, and another level is a mechanical statue of Mario inhabited by larger-than-life toys and moving parts.
 * World 4 of Super Mario Bros 3 was giant themed. One level in this world had doors between normal and giant copies of the same level.
 * The "Huge" half of Tiny Huge Island in Super Mario 64.
 * The level is actually one singular island with pipes that alter its scale when accessed, but it isn't clear whether it's the island itself or Mario who is shrinking and growing.
 * The Toy Time Galaxy in Super Mario 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.
 * Supermassive Galaxy from Super Mario Galaxy 2, a probable nod to the abundance of this trope in the Mario series.
 * Final Fantasy Legend 2 featured 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.
 * The obscurish platformer 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.
 * Logbox 720 in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is the innards of a giant Xbox 360 pastiche.
 * The Lost Underworld in Earthbound. You're normal-sized kids...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 Four, 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 PS 1 version of Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4, the secret level, Little Big World is one of these, taking place on the worktop of somebodies kitchen.
 * Several Team Fortress 2 custom maps, such as cp_toy_fort, place the characters in a children's bedroom or other similar setting, making them the size of mice.
 * Possibly the Ur Example, 1984's Henry's House puts the player in the role of then newborn Prince Harry exploring Windsor Castle

Games where your character is naturally small

 * Pikmin and its sequel, which feature a tiny character trying to survive in the undergrowth.
 * In fact, the instruction booklet for both of the games in the series shows Captain Olimar to be around the size of a US Quarter. The Pikmin themselves are around the size of pennies, including their "stem."
 * The NES Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers games.
 * The house Chibi-Robo takes place in is a Macro Zone, as the titular robot is only a few inches tall.
 * Various Tom & Jerry games on the NES and SNES.
 * The NES Monster in My Pocket game.
 * All of the various Hamtaro games.
 * The Army Men games
 * Any Micro Machines or RC racing game such as RC Pro-Am.
 * Sim Ant
 * The Glider series. You're a paper airplane.
 * The early levels and early parts of some later levels in Katamari Damacy 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.
 * Several custom levels for Team Fortress 2 are set amongst children's toys, as if the characters were toys themselves.
 * Ditto with custom maps for the Unreal series.
 * These are usually called either "toy" or "rats" maps.
 * Cool Spot. You're that red spot in the logo on a bottle of 7-Up.
 * I Wanna Be the Guy at times.
 * Mister Mosquito
 * There was a game called Buck Bumble for the N64 where you played a cyborg bee and flew through a garden. You also had a kickin' rad theme song, but that's irrelevant to this trope.
 * 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 Small Brawl has it where you use RC cars rather than real ones.
 * Blockland, where you play as a small toy man, similar to a lego minifigure. (And in the old Alpha version, you WERE a lego minifigure.)